We were walking out of a classic “good bad movie”, as my friend Jonathan and I call the films we often go to see. Taken stars Liam Neeson as a former CIA agent who has to dispatch an assortment of Albanians, Arabs and French in the course of rescuing his virgin daughter from the clutches of evil white slavers in Paris.

Jonathan was dubious: “It's just stoking up American paranoia about cheese-eating surrender monkeys and everyone else.” Jonathan is a nice guy, who thinks well of people.

“Tell me one politically correct movie that is any good,” I said. He thought about it. He couldn't.

By a strange coincidence I have been reading An Indian Odyssey by Martin Buckley, which recalls the plot of the Ramayana, the Sanskrit epic in which a beautiful young woman is kidnapped by some villains and the hero has to kill a lot of them to get her back. Although revered as quasi-sacred by millions of Hindus, this story is no more politically correct than Taken. In it, a bunch of taller, paler-skinned people from the north crush smaller darker-skinned people in the south, a narrative that, even now, is tangled up in the Sri Lankan civil war. The Tamils are fighting the plot of the Ramayana. The greatest work of Indian literature appears, from some points of view, racist.

This shouldn't surprise readers in Europe. All our great foundational works turn out, on close inspection, to have a Rambo-style movie at their core. Just as there are good bad movies, there are plenty of bad good books. Martin Amis likes to remind us how the Koran recommends smiting down the infidel. But to be fair, the Bible started all this stuff about us over here and you lot (Philistines, Midianites etc) over there where God can come and give you a damn good hiding. I know the New Testament tries to tone it down a bit, but you can see how the “Good News” can be interpreted, à la Andy McNab*, to mean war between believers and unbelievers.

The pagans were no less paranoid. The Greeks feared non-Greek speakers (barbaroi). Strangely, that Liam Neeson plot seems to crop up again in Homer. Beautiful white woman taken by dodgy foreigners. Strategy: shock and awe, invade and annihilate. The Nazis didn't invent genocide. It's there from the beginning of Western culture.

Fast forward to Virgil's Aeneid (which picks up where the Iliad left off). What do those few Trojans who escape the Greek holocaust get up to? They sail away, have sex, invade another country and set up another empire bigger and meaner than the Greeks could come up with.

And don't imagine the British are iambic pentameter-loving peaceniks either. Some time ago I went to see the Benjamin Britten opera of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Call me sensitive, but I was appalled by the pivotal scene, which appears to consist of kidnapping a woman, drugging and then raping her, while the fairies dance around singing.

Most of the great French writers of the 19th century dreamt of being another Napoleon, as Balzac admitted. Stendhal has a character with Napoleonic delusions dress up as a priest while seducing married women and shooting one who spurns him in a church.

In Madame Bovary Flaubert turns a naive provincial woman into a serial adulterer and tortures her to death with poison. No surprise that Flaubert's favourite writer was the Marquis de Sade.

Realising how sick literature was, Jean-Paul Sartre argued that the only solution was to hate everyone in an even-handed, fair-minded sort of way: “Hell is other people.”

That might provide an epigraph to any number of dark Russian novels. Raskolnikov, Dostoevsky's brooding axe-murderer, makes a sympathetic hero. I still don't know after several hundred pages if any (or all) of the Karamazov brothers killed their father, but I know he was asking for it. Moby-Dick is cruel to whales, Death in the Afternoon to bulls and Lord of the Flies to fat boys. William Golding's novel, recklessly distributed to generations of schoolchildren as somehow “improving”, may well be an allegory of how impossible it is for a writer to say anything edifying or uplifting. You mean well, you make a good start and before you know where you are, you've descended into a spiral of ritual bloodletting, savagery and Satanism, and it's back to the plot of In Cold Blood all over again.

We tend to blame our genes for just about everything wrong with us. But culture has a lot to answer for. Even when we naked apes try really hard not to behave badly, the whole Western canon is stacked heavily against us.

The critic Roland Barthes said that “all language is fascist”. In practical terms, writers have something of the sadist and the psycho. But clearly readers also have a taste for everything that is bad - we prefer Inferno to Paradiso (at least while we're alive).

The sad truth is that not only do the Horror and Crime genres sell, but there isn't even a book stack labelled Good Deeds or Altruism. You can bet that when a chainsaw or drill pops up on screen it isn't there for DIY. When the film called Legal and Nice comes out, I can't see even Jonathan going. All good works of art are bad.

* “Give somebody the good news” = kill him.

Andy Martin is a lecturer in French at Cambridge University. His new book Beware Invisible Cows: My Search for the Source of the Universe is published by Simon and Schuster next year

Ten good bad books

The Bible The “Good Book” is the first really bad book, giving tribal, religious and sexual discrimination the divine seal of approval

Oedipus Rex (Sophocles) Without the Oedipus complex, fathers (and mothers) would sleep more peacefully in their beds at night

The Republic (Plato) Strongly totalitarian, with its dreams of “philosopher-kings” and eugenically bred guardian warriors

Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen) Covertly imperialist, overtly encourages unhealthy obsession with finding Mr Right

The Sorrows of Young Werther (Goethe), Initiated suicide cult. Napoleon banned it

Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë) Isn't it sexist to call all men sexist?

In Search of Lost Time (Marcel Proust) Discriminates against anyone not artistic, beautiful or rich. And with a bad memory or intolerance for long sentences

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Jules Verne) Captain Nemo is a terrorist

Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad) Xenophobic and misogynistic

The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) Romanticises a shady bootlegger

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