Maybe all people are drunks, I suspect. Drunk on alcohol, prayer, horseracing, work, order or anything else. Some are more evolved drunks, who can discipline themselves and funnel their energy into high achievements. Most are middling drunks, who get their kick in church or in the pub. The lowest kinds are just pigs.

Maybe when God, if he exists, looks down at men, he actually sees a group of drunks tittering in various directions, bumping into each other, or alone with their individual source of intoxication. Some of those who get their kick from prayer are able to gaze into his face, for a few seconds, and hurry down the slopes of the mountain, to tell of what of they saw. But down in the valley, others are swilling down their own drinks- money, status, collecting stamps, science, and they listen to him the way drunks in a tavern listen to one of them shouting his personal mad story. Some get thrilled by what they heard, and start drinking his God-drink, to get the kick that he experienced. Others remain faithful to their own liquor, because they don’t want to mix drinks.

Jalal ud Rumi said:

All day I think about it, then at night I say it.
Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing?
I have no idea.
My soul is from elsewhere, I'm sure of that,
and I intend to end up there.


This drunkenness began in some other tavern.
When I get back around to that place,
I'll be completely sober. Meanwhile,
I'm like a bird from another continent, sitting in this aviary.
The day is coming when I fly off,
but who is it now in my ear who hears my voice?
Who says words with my mouth?


Who looks out with my eyes? What is the soul?
I cannot stop asking.
If I could taste one sip of an answer,
I could break out of this prison for drunks.
I didn't come here of my own accord, and I can't leave that way.
Whoever brought me here will have to take me home.

This poetry. I never know what I'm going to say.
I don't plan it.
When I'm outside the saying of it,
I get very quiet and rarely speak at all.

We have a huge barrel of wine, but no cups.
That's fine with us. Every morning
we glow and in the evening we glow again.


They say there's no future for us. They're right.
Which is fine with us.

I am surprised by the profound irrationality of people. As a child, I was brought in a world of order, where , when I asked questions, there were parents and teachers to give me reasonable answers. Good parents take care to make a child feel there is a structure to the world, because he needs it for his mental sanity as he grows up. We do not only make children believe in Santa Klaus, we make them believe the world itself is some kind of Santa Klaus, something rational and benevolent. Later we realise that Santa Klaus does not exist, but most of us shield our minds to the fact that the world itself is not Santa. Or, maybe, we dig our heads into our drunkenness to forget the disorder of the world, like children who go on arrangeing their stamp collection on the dinner table, while their parents are throwing dishes at each other, because it would be too painful to feel the reality.

I remember, as a child, watching the film “Shoa” and asking my parents why Hitler killed the Jews, and I could feel that they were struggling with an answer. This, I thought, was because they were not well informed. I thought that there was some reason, certainly not a justifiable one, but one which made sense to the person, and which one could understand ( in the sense of “coldly following the logic”, not that of empathising). Now as a grown up, I can understand the logic, or rather , the feeling, for like most people I have in me what some call “the reptilian mind” , a lower level of mind which contains a cold-blooded hatred. It is like the cellar in a horror film, in which lives a monster, while the actors are living a normal life in the ground floor. Not only did Hitler let loose that monster, but something strange happened, more horrifying than the existence of that creature. It actually blended itself with the rationality of civilisation. It took a methodical, bureaucratic character, companies sent letters to the concerned ministry, detailing the efficiency of their toxic gases, of their incinerators. Local policemen in occupied countries saw to it that Jews and others were rounded up, and boarded their trains to the concentration camps in disciplined fashion. Society itself became monstrous. It was not an exceptional occurrence. I have heard that in Rwanda, the killing squads worked from 9 to 5 o’clock, with a hour lunch at noon. Maybe there is a latent monstrosity even in the running of modern society. If one thinks of small –town capitalism in a place like Pakistan, for example, with its slave labour in the brickyards, its sweatshop carpet factories.

The reader will feel I am writing something profoundly banal. I am opposing romanticism ( the emphasis on man’s irrationality, his capacity to be a prophet, or a devil) to Kant’s belief in man’s capacity for reason. Hitler was a degraded descendant of German Romanticism, and Marx, despite all the deathly seriousness of later Marxist thought, had a romantic vision of a society based on fraternity, artistic self-realisation.

The Ancien Régime society corseted all of man’s rational and irrational impulses into the rigid founding myths of feudalism: the belief in the “Chain of Beings”, with God at the top, then the angels, then human society, headed by a monarchical family whose legitimacy lay enshrined in tradition, and down to the animal and plant kingdoms. The arrival of the French revolution freed both man’s reason and unreason. New spiritual beliefs, new blueprints of social organisation blossomed in the 19th century.

What is striking in modern society is the way many people blend, in their lifestyles, a rigidly rational behaviour at work with extreme irrationality in terms of their personal beliefs and lifestyle. One’s neighbour will, when buying a car, examine all available models, discuss their fuel efficiency, the reliability of their engines, their cost-quality ratio with friends. The same person will have a belief in the literal veracity of the Bible, for example, even down to the six days of creation and Noah’s ark. Of course, the Ancient Régime had its horsedealers, bankers and architects who were both shrewd and devout people. But their irrational beliefs were in concordance with the ruling myths of society. Today’s society offers no overarching myths, but in its very, slightly condescendent tolerance of all forms of belief, there is the tacit hope that somehow people will get to know better, in the long run. There is a latent dominance of the scientific point of view when explaining the universe.

Beyond the contradictions in the every day behaviour of religious fanatics, what is interesting to observe is how, while, in a way, the rationalist point of view has triumphed, in that it is the ruling paradigm when it comes organising society, to conducting scientific research, to the extraction of profit, yet when it comes to humanity’s intimate contact with the world, there irrationality rules. Even the most fanatical terrorist group will organise its cells with rigid discipline, conduct its financial transactions and plan its next attack with severe attention to detail. On the other hand, even the most severe-looking scientist will, upon closer examination, come out as a profoundly passionate man- if not, he would not have devoted his life to be a (most of the time) badly paid researcher. The most surprising group in this regard is the communists, who are , most of the time, very rationalist in their view of the world, being atheistic and admirative of science. Yet their understanding of human nature is surprisingly naïve, full of a sentimental belief in the goodness of the Worker, in the possibility of a society fuelled by altruism and fraternity.

In the 19th century, there was a belief that scientific progress was not only a method, but a philosophy of life itself, and that the world would one become a paradise of moderate, practical people. I guess nowadays, not only do a great many people feel a certain dread when they learn of the latest “achievements” of science in genetics or artificial intelligence, but there is a realisation that society will never be a conclave of wise,rational persons, but more like Rumi’s tavern, where drunks will forever make wild boasts of their achievements, quote bad poetry at the waitress, and quarrel about their favourite football teams.