Fake history is flourishing across the West. Just consider these three cases

Australia's equivalent is the extraordinary career of Bruce Pascoe's Dark Emu. Published in 2014, this argues that Aboriginal people, far from being primitive nomads, developed the first egalitarian society, invented democratic government, eschewed "imperial warfare", pioneered complex fishing technology, and were sophisticated agriculturalists. Such was the morally superior civilisation that white colonisers trashed in their greed, racist contempt and relentless violence.

Dark Emu was named Book of the Year and received the Indigenous Writers' Prize in the 2016 NSW Premier's Literary Awards. It has sold more than 360,000 copies and has been made the subject of an ABC documentary.

And yet, while enthusiastically praised for challenging conventional views about Aboriginal culture and popularising the topic, it has been widely criticised for being factually untrue. While not a professional academic, Peter O'Brien has forensically dismantled it in Bitter Harvest: The Illusion of Aboriginal Agriculture in Bruce Pascoe's Dark Emu, systematically exposing the many gaps between claim and evidence.

And in Farmers or Hunter Gatherers? The Dark Emu Debate, eminent anthropologist Peter Sutton and archaeologist Keryn Walshe, while vigorously rejecting the description of Aboriginal culture as "primitive", nevertheless dismiss Pascoe's claims for Aboriginal agriculture and aquaculture, and expose his editing of primary sources to make them appear to support his thesis. Reviewers have described their book variously as "rigorously researched", "masterful", and "measured".

So, prime ministers, archbishops, academics, editors and public broadcasters are all in the business of exaggerating the colonial sins of their own countries against noble (not-so-very) savages – from Vancouver to London to Sydney. Why?

The reasons are several, not least a well-meaning desire to raise respect for Indigenous cultures with a view to "healing" race relations. But that doesn't explain the impatient brushing aside – even the aggressive suppression – of concerns about evidence and truth in the eager rush to irrational self-criticism.

One plausible explanation is the operation of a degenerate Christian sensibility. For Christians, the paradoxical mark of the genuinely righteous person is a profound awareness of their own unrighteousness. The saint is distinguished as the one who knows more deeply than others just what a sinner he really is.

There's considerable virtue in this, of course, for it tempers self-righteousness with compassion for fellow sinners, forbidding the righteous to cast the unrighteous beyond the human pale.

Yet, like all virtue, it's vulnerable to vice. For it can degenerate from genuine humility into a perverse bid for supreme self-righteousness, which exaggerates one's sins and broadcasts the display of repentance: holier-than-thou because more-sinful-than-thou.

In The Tyranny of Guilt, French philosopher Pascal Bruckner captures this when he writes of contemporary, post-imperial Europe (and, by extension, the West): "This is the paternalism of the guilty conscience: seeing ourselves as the kings of infamy is still a way of staying on the crest of history.

"Since Freud we know that masochism is only a reversed sadism, a passion for domination turned against oneself. Europe is still messianic in a minor key … Barbarity is Europe's great pride, which it acknowledges only in itself; it denies that others are barbarous, finding attenuating circumstances for them (which is a way of denying them all responsibility)."

In this display of virtue, the penitent hogs the stage: "By erecting lack of love for oneself into a leading principle, we lie to ourselves about ourselves and close ourselves to others … In Western self-hatred, the Other has no place. It is a narcissistic relationship in which the African, the Indian and Arab are brought in as extras." Maybe Australia's Aboriginal people, too.