I’ve just been on Skype with my wife, who’s teaching in Paris. Our conversation was interrupted by sirens and she took the computer over to the window to show me the view. The street had been cordoned off by police. She didn’t know why. We checked social media for clues. Nothing. As we spoke, the cordon was lifted and together we searched the internet to see if the suspects in the Charlie Hebdo murders were still thought to be “headed towards Paris”. Not a day to visit a museum or sit on a cafe terrace.

Today I feel tired. I feel depressed and afraid. Above all I feel old. Somehow this attack, with its mix of the grotesquely familiar and the unforeseen, has brought home to me in a way other recent atrocities have not, how much of my life has now been lived inside this war trapped in its logic of permanent emergency. I never want to see another man kneeling in an orange jumpsuit. I never want to stand in another security line wondering if today will be the day. I am hollowed out by disgust. I am worn down by outrage. I want to get off the damn bus.

Of course I can’t. None of us can. The war will go on until it doesn’t, until it runs out of fuel and the historians take over, arguing about who or what won. I no longer expect to see an end in my lifetime. It will take a generation, and many enormous geopolitical shifts, before the wheels of this juggernaut shudder to a halt. Until there are no more self-dramatising young men who prefer the abstraction of death to living a meaningful life, until there are no more wealthy pious bigots to fund them, until there are no more disenfranchised migrants pressed against the border fence and no more hard-faced “realists” eager to turn the war dial up to 11, this will go on and we will have to live through it.

I would have said nothing, had I not felt that – on this, of all days – it would be an admission of defeat. Freedom of expression is empty if it is not used, but I can barely bring myself to sit down at my desk and read the commentary, let alone add to the pile of hopeful platitudes, lofty sentiments about liberty, calls for solidarity and compassion and moderation, or firmness, or bloody, bloody revenge. Why did this happen? Multiculturalism, drones, Guantánamo, the inherent viciousness of Islam, the inherent viciousness of religion more generally. Take your pick, whichever one suits your politics, whatever tin drum you want to bang on.

Just don’t bang it near me. I don’t want to read about how “we’re all” anything, because wishing away complexity is inadequate and juvenile. I want to hear no talk about cracking down on anyone or tightening anything up. We have cracked and tightened for a decade and a half and all we have to show for it is a bloated, unaccountable security state that is eroding the cherished freedoms we claim to be so eager to protect.

Above all I want to hear nothing about barbarism. The caricature of the jihadi as a medieval throwback, animated by ancient passions, may be comforting to those who would like to wrap themselves in the mantle of civilisation and pose as heirs of Voltaire, but as a way of actually understanding anything, it’s feeble. Understanding is the very least we owe the dead.

The jihadi movement is a thoroughly modern beast, which ironically owes much to the French revolutionary legacy of 1789. Though they are religious millenarians, looking to bring about global submission to the will of God, they are also utopian revolutionaries, and have adopted tactical thinking from the various movements that trace their legacy to Paris, and that inaugural moment of modernity.

The attack on Charlie Hebdo was, of course, intended to raise the price on the exercise of freedom of speech. It was intended to cast the shadow of the guillotine over every editorial conference, every pitch, every keyboard and pen. It was meant to make us think twice. This much we understand. And it’s working. It has been working since the days of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. Charlie Hebdo’s brand of crude confrontational religious satire was already a rarity. It will only become more so.

But the attack was also intended to sharpen contradictions, to harden positions and polarise opinion, pushing France (and the rest of the world) away from complexity, from nuance, from the recognition that one can be, for example, a believing Muslim and a loyal French citizen, towards the simple binary opposition between “us” and “them”, the binary of war. Why, asks a friend, did they do this, when they must surely realise that ordinary French Muslims would pay the cost? Because that was their intention. Serious repression by the French state will complete the circuit of the Charlie Hebdo attack, widening the gap between the poles. It would be a sort of collusion with the terrorists, a collaboration. In Britain we have only to think back to the disastrous consequences of internment in Northern Ireland. In the United States, the Bush government’s authorisation of torture has, far from keeping anyone or anything safe, been the most effective jihadi recruiting sergeant imaginable.

Those of us who want to short-circuit the logic of confrontation have our work cut out. Even if the French keep their nerve, even if the state and people do not succumb to this bloody provocation, we still have to distinguish our position from compromise. Mumblings about “respect” and “avoiding giving offence” seem cowardly and dishonourable. And compromise with the jihadi position is meaningless: the jihadi is absolute because otherwise he is nothing. Without the childish simplicity of binary logic, all his power and glamour leak away, and he becomes just another lost boy, picking up a gun in the hope that it will have the answer written on the barrel.

But refusing to compromise with the jihadi does not mean becoming his mirror. When I’m stupid enough to switch on cable news here in New York, the optics are different but I hear much that is familiar. Big hair and bright teeth instead of black flags and balaclavas, but the same parochialism, the same arrogance, the same atavistic lust for violence, the same pathetic need for good guys and bad guys, to be on the winning team.

If I have anything hopeful or uplifting to contribute, this is it – that anyone who tries to fit the world into binaries is necessarily fragile. The slightest hint of complexity, and their brittle self-identity may shatter. To refuse the jihadi’s logic of escalation without becoming mired in grubby pleading, we have to say – and keep on saying, keep on writing with our pens that are supposedly so much mightier than their swords – that life is not so simple, that our many problems do not have single, total solutions, that utopia is a dead place, without life or change, without air.

Here in Brooklyn I’m writing in a room half a block from a busy shopping street. The supermarket and pharmacy are owned by Egyptians. Between the dental surgery and the Korean-run bodega is a mosque. It’s prayer time, and a double line of taxis and limos is parked under my window, as it is every day. This is the world, the real world, into which I will soon go out for a walk, wishing my wife were back here with me, safe.