Ron Ferguson Humanity mourns and the world’s pain goes on

As a species, we are supposed to be civilised now. Yet the barbarism we have almost become used to seeing on our television screens tells us a different story

later that night i held an atlas in my lap ran my fingers across the

whole world and whispered where does it hurt? it answered everywhere everywhere everywhere.

So there you are, sitting at a table with family and friends in a nice, though crowded, restaurant. It's a significant birthday for you and, as the wine flows, the jollity increases. Exaggerated reminiscences of your childhood and teenage years produce gales of laughter. It feels good to be alive.

Then the restaurant door opens, and a man walks in. At first you think he's wearing fancy dress; then you realise it's a black balaclava. In a matter of seconds, he is firing a Kalashnikov rifle. Bullets and blood fly everywhere, as shocked people try to escape.

The gunman is without mercy: men, women and children are casualties. What has begun as an evening of celebration has ended abruptly in sickening terror.

Is this a picture of life in Britain in the very near future?

There was a time when this kind of narrative would have seemed the far-fetched province of novels. No longer. The massacres in Paris on Friday were all too real.

More than 100 people of all ages left home that evening, not knowing that they would never return. The killers were cynical in their planning and remorseless in the execution of these plans.

I am reminded of the words of the great James Baldwin: “The way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain."

Paris, historically, has known all about terror and bloodshed. The French Revolution was forged in human blood. Mme Guillotine knew all about separating heads from bodies in the name of a greater cause.

But that was then, and this is now.

As a species, we are supposed to be civilised now. Yet the barbarism we have almost become used to seeing on our television screens tells us a different story.

What happened in Paris last week brings that sense of barbarism closer. The unthinkable has suddenly become all too thinkable.

When the targets are simply random and the perpetrators are prepared to sacrifice their own lives, it becomes very hard for any government to keep all its citizens safe.

There is a wider issue here: it has to do with human vulnerability and the illusion that we can control the future. In so-called “normal” circumstances, we go about our daily lives with certain assumptions about our safety and security. The events in Paris throw a hand grenade into the middle of these assumptions.

When the barbarians are not just at the gates but are climbing over the gates, the “verities” we live by are shown to be insubstantial.

We have a sense of solidarity with ordinary Parisians right now. They are, we feel, “like us” – ordinary people with similar kinds of hopes and aspirations.

We want to, literally, embrace them.

But do we have any feelings of human solidarity with the many young Moslems who feel so alienated from the west that they will admire the perpetrators of these abhorrent acts – and even be tempted to emulate them? Or do we simply want to kill them?

Now, that's a much more difficult question. But it gets to the core of the matter.

We can keep bombing this elusive enemy. There will be stronger support now for more “boots on the ground” in places like Syria and Libya.

The invasion of Iraq was supposed to be necessary to keep us safe. In fact, the evidence suggests that it helped to swell the ranks of the terrorists. There seems to be an inexhaustible supply of alienated, angry young men and women who are prepared to surrender their own lives for their cause.

The fact that the west has, in the past, too often favoured and propped up dictators like Saddam Hussein does not help, either.

In the current feverish climate, we are in danger of being sucked into yet another military adventure that is costly in terms of lives and money, while acting like a recruiting sergeant for the opposition.

If there is to be any longterm solution, it must involve a committed quest for justice in the world – and also the establishment of projects, in this country as well as overseas, that help to give meaning to the lives of many disillusioned young people.

In the meantime, the world's pain will go on. I have only recently become aware of the work of Warsan Shire, a London-based Kenyan-born Somali writer. Here is what she wrote in one of her poems: