a dire purposiveness about the Olympian passion for signing up to treaties and handing power over to international bureaucrats who want to rule the world. Everything down to the details of family life and the modes of education are governed and guided so as to fit into the rising project of a world government. The independence of universities in choosing who to admit, of firms choosing whom to employ, of citizens to say and think what they like has all been subject to regulation in the name of harmony between nations and peace between religions. The playfulness and creativity of Western societies is under threat. So too is their identity and freedom.

The intrusiveness that Minogue describes is an expression of what is perhaps the most stultifying characteristic of political correctness: its addiction to displays of benevolence, to the emotion of virtue. When the Harvard professor Barbara Johnson justified the suppression of conservative points of view on campus with the argument that "professors should have less freedom of expression than writers and artists, because professors are supposed to be creating a better world", she provided a good example of how the imperatives of political correctness are at odds with the principles of open debate. Or consider the case of Peter Kirstein, who until recently was an obscure professor of history at Xavier University in Cincinnati. Professor Kirstein was one of many who received a form-letter email from a cadet at the U.S. Air Force Academy soliciting advice about an upcoming conference. Kirstein's reply catapulted him to temporary notoriety: "You are a disgrace to this country and I am furious you would even think I would support you and your aggressive baby killing tactics of collateral damage." Kirstein went on to excoriate the United States Air Force for imperialism, cowardice and bringing "death and destruction" to "nonwhite peoples throughout the world."

What is interesting is not so much Kirstein's loathsome little missive, which was hardly more than an off-the-shelf specimen of politically-correct academic rancor, but the self-infatuated conviction of virtue that informs it. On his website, Professor Kirstein lists the twelve points of his "teaching philosophy." It includes helpful items such as "Teach peace, freedom, diversity, multiculturalism and challenge American unilateralism." But the most telling of his twelve points is the first, which he prints in bold face: "Teaching is a moral act."

Now, there is undoubtedly a sense in which teaching is a moral act. But its morality is like happiness according to Aristotle: it is achieved not directly but indirectly through the responsible engagement with the tasks at hand. Indirection--moral subtlety, an appreciation of human imperfection--are resources deliberately slighted by the politically correct. In their pursuit of a better, more enlightened world, PC types let an abstract moralism triumph over realism, benevolence over prudence, earnest humorlessness over patience.

As has often been noted, an absolute commitment to benevolence, like the road that is paved with good intentions, typically leads to an unprofitable destination. In Physics and Politics, Walter Bagehot summed up the point when he observed that

The most melancholy of human reflections, perhaps, is that, on the whole, it is a question whether the benevolence of mankind does most good or harm. Great good, no doubt, philanthropy does, but then it also does great evil. It augments so much vice, it multiplies so much suffering, it brings to life such great populations to suffer and to be vicious, that it is open to argument whether it be or be not an evil to the world, and this is entirely because excellent people fancy they can do much by rapid action--that they will most benefit the world when they most relieve their own feelings.

Bagehot wrote in the 1870s. His words are if anything more pertinent now.

Benevolence is a curious creature. Its operation tends to be more beneficent the more specific it is. This was a point that James Fitzjames Stephen, the great 19th-century critic of John Stuart Mill, made in his book Liberty, Equality, Fraternity:

The man who works from himself outwards, whose conduct is governed by ordinary motives, and who acts with a view to his own advantage and the advantage of those who are connected with himself in definite, assignable ways, produces in the ordinary course of things much more happiness to others . . . than a moral Don Quixote who is always liable to sacrifice himself and his neighbors. On the other hand, a man who has a disinterested love of the human race--that is to say, who has got a fixed idea about some way of providing for the management of the concerns of mankind--is an unaccountable person . . . who is capable of making his love for men in general the ground of all sorts of violence against men in particular.

Political correctness tends to breed the sort of unaccountability that Stephen warns against. At its center is a union of abstract benevolence, which takes mankind as a whole for its object, with rigid moralism. This is a toxic, misery-producing brew. In On Enlightenment, the Australian philosopher David Stove got to the heart of the problem when he pointed out that it is precisely this combination of universal benevolence fired by uncompromising moralism that underwrites the cult of political correctness. "Either element on its own", Stove observed,

is almost always comparatively harmless. A person who is convinced that he has a moral obligation to be benevolent, but who in fact ranks morality below fame (say), or ease; or again, a person who puts morality first, but is also convinced that the supreme moral obligation is, not to be benevolent, but to be holy (say), or wise, or creative: either of these people might turn out to be a scourge of his fellow humans, though in most cases he will not. But even at the worst, the misery which such a person causes will fall incomparably short of the misery caused by Lenin, or Stalin, or Mao, or Ho Chi Minh, or Kim Il-sung, or Pol Pot, or Castro: persons convinced both of the supremacy of benevolence among moral obligations, and of the supremacy of morality among all things. It is this combination which is infallibly and enormously destructive of human happiness.

Of course, as Stove goes on to note, this "lethal combination" is by no means peculiar to communists. It provides the emotional fuel for utopians from Robespierre to the politically-correct bureaucrats who preside over more and more of life in Western societies today. They mean well. They seek to boost all mankind up to their own plane of enlightenment. Inequality outrages their sense of justice. They regard conventional habits of behavior as so many obstacles to be overcome on the path to perfection. They see tradition as the enemy of innovation, which they embrace as a lifeline to moral progress. They cannot encounter a wrong without seeking to right it. The idea that some evils may be ineradicable is anathema to them. Likewise the notion that the best is the enemy of the good, that many choices are to some extent choices among evils--such proverbial, conservative wisdom outrages their sense of moral perfectibility.

Alas, the result is not paradise but a campaign to legislate virtue, to curtail eccentricity, to smother individuality, to barter truth for the current moral or political enthusiasm. For centuries, political philosophers have understood that the lust for equality is the enemy of freedom. That species of benevolence underwrote the tragedy of communist tyranny. The rise of political correctness has redistributed that lust over a new roster of issues: not the proletariat, but the environment, not the struggling masses, but "reproductive freedom", gay rights, the welfare state, the Third World, diversity training, and an end to racism and xenophobia. It looks, in Marx's famous mot, like history repeating itself not as tragedy but as farce.

It would be a rash man, however, who made no provision for a reprise of tragedy.