Some commentators blame James Bartholomew for coining the term “virtue signalling”. But admonishments against blowing one’s own trumpet date back at least 2,000 years earlier.

In Christianity it’s taught that virtue should not be performative, but active. To be good, a person had to do good. Jesus was very vocal when it came to his criticism of the Pharisee sect and their showy, costly acts of piety, in the absence of what he considered to be genuine virtue.

The sixth-century BCE Chinese philosopher Kong Qiu, better known in the west as Confucius, would have agreed. He called for a society built on five elements; jen........

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