I’m a hypocrite. Always have been and always will be. And, to be honest, I am not beating myself up about it either. In fact, I want to speak up for us hypocrites, to persuade you all of our more subtle virtues. Yes, you read that right: hurrah for hypocrisy! It’s a large club, but few people admit to membership. And partly that’s because we generally get an unfair rap. “Do not look dismal, like the hypocrites,” was the reading for this week’s Ash Wednesday service, where us Christians are marked on the head with an ash cross and told not to make outward and ostentatious displays of our religiosity. That sort of thing, goes the standard Christian line, is for the Pharisees (one of the most maligned groups of religious people ever). But it is with the modern media that the charge of hypocrisy really takes off, for it is here that exposing the gap between moral aspiration and actual behaviour has become one of the standard measures of a person’s moral standing.

So why defend the hypocrites? It was a conversation with my fellow Guardian columnist George Monbiot that started me thinking. “Better a hypocrite than a cynic,” he said to me last month. And he was completely right. At least a hypocrite aspires to something, claims some allegiance even if she or he cannot live up to it. A cynic, on the other hand, is the one person who can never be accused of hypocrisy because cynics don’t believe in anything in the first place.

I don’t accuse the ancient cynics. They were a generally good lot. No, I mean the “What’s the point of voting? What’s the point of caring? What’s the point of getting out of bed?” lot. Having no professed commitment, these people are obviously at no risk of not meeting their non-belief in anything. They can sit in the corner and shrug piously, pointing the finger at other people’s failed attempts to improve the world, smugly content that as long as they keep up the pretence of non-belief they can never be accused of double standards. It’s straight from the “you can’t fail if you don’t try” philosophy of life. Oh, what a sad little denuded world they inhabit. How narrow and small.

Hypocrisy is an accusation often levelled at two groups in particular: lefties and the religious. And the thing that both these groups have in common is that they both want to employ a moral vision to redesign the world. Which opens the possibility of professing a position that one fails fully to live up to – ie hypocrisy. Indeed, unless one is a saint, I cannot see how it is possible to be a Christian and not a hypocrite. To my mind, this hypocrisy is a near inevitable consequence of taking any sort of moral stand. Near inevitable, because there are (maybe) such people as saints, and whatever the lefty equivalent is, who fully live up to their best intentions. But for us mere mortals, François de La Rochefoucauld was right: “Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue.” The failure to live up to one’s best moral intentions does not discredit the moral intentions.

My intention here is not to over-praise hypocrisy (other than for rhetorical effect) but rather to condemn contemporary cynicism, a diminutive philosophy that espouses maximum protection from being wrong or being disappointed. This was also the purpose of the bishops’ now notorious letter to their churches, urging church-goers to get stuck into the political process and advising them not to give in to a prevailing sense that nothing really matters, that politicians are all as bad as each other, my vote doesn’t really count etc. They didn’t say: vote left (personally, I’d be happy if they had). They just said: vote, get stuck in, care more about what is going on.

To speak of politicians as being hypocrites is simply a rather immature way of saying that politicians are human beings. And when they fail, let’s pick them up for the failing itself, and not because there is a gap between aspiration and reality. For the only way to get rid of that gap is to get rid of the aspiration. And that way real darkness lies.

@giles_fraser