Joan Smith: Reason is on the run. Psychics rule

On Monday, when a plane crashed near John F Kennedy airport in New York, the forces of unreason were unleashed once again. Shocked commentators rushed to point out parallels with the suicide hijackings two months ago, yet it was apparent within hours that the odds were in favour of a terrible accident.

The plane got into trouble so soon after take-off that there wasn't time for the crew to make distress calls, and even the most determined hijacker would barely have had time to leave his seat. Neither does it seem likely that an Islamic terrorist would deliberately target a plane carrying large numbers of immigrants returning to the Dominican Republic, an impoverished third world country. From this perspective, the differences between what happened in Queens on Monday and the events of 11 September are as striking as the similarities.

This is not to deny that the loss of American Airlines Flight 587 was a tragedy. Harrowing stories have emerged about the passengers, some of whom had survived the attacks on the twin towers or lost relatives in the atrocity. Again, this is not as unlikely as it seems; it is a reasonable guess that hundreds of thousands of people in the five boroughs that make up New York either knew some of the victims or watched the burning buildings collapse. Sir Paul McCartney, who flew into JFK on Concorde in time to see the plume of smoke from the crash site, regaled reporters with an account of his conversation with a fellow-passenger, the Duchess of York: "I turned to Sarah when we were told it was another plane crash and just said: 'How weird is this? The last time I saw you was 10 September in New York, now this.'"

To which the answer is, not very weird at all. Disasters are not unknown at busy international airports – there have been seven at JFK in 35 years – and celebrities fly much more often than the rest of us. (I would be astounded if I boarded Concorde and discovered that neither McCartney nor a minor royal was sitting nearby.) The terrorist attacks of 11 September were bad enough without trying to read occult meanings into another, unconnected event. Horrible coincidences happen, and there is no need to start constructing quasi-Biblical scenarios, as some people did last week, in which Americans are being "tested" by the sequence of disasters. Both the crash and the suicide hijackings have rational explanations, even if the latter offers some grim insights into human behaviour, and it is positively perverse to claim the existence of a supernatural mission to put New Yorkers on their mettle.

One of my first thoughts after the terrorist attacks was that someone would soon be ferreting around in Nostradamus, searching for a doom-laden passage about flames and towers. Sure enough, in these troubled times, Americans are turning to prayer and psychics in droves; eight of the top 15 advice books in the New York Times bestseller list are on religious themes. There is even a bestselling book in which a "psychic television host" discusses his conversations with people delicately referred to as "those who crossed the bar". I assume this means "dead", in ordinary language.

It is a relief to discover that readers are also buying books on the Taliban and American foreign policy, although the non-fiction bestseller list inevitably features The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Samuel Huntington's tendentious thesis about the cold war being replaced by a battle between cultures. The problem with this notion is that its characterisation of culture is monolithic, pitting a supposedly enlightened US and Europe against the irrational forces of Islam. Recent events have demonstrated how flawed this notion is; there are secular, modernising currents in Islamic countries, while the West has its own problems with a widespread revival of belief in supernatural beings, superstition and magic. As we were reminded again last week, we are currently experiencing an upsurge of fundamentalism in the West as well as the East, and our most urgent task is to reject both. The world desperately needs to be resecularised, and fast.

Yah, boo to you, too, Christopher

I have known the British journalist Christopher Hitchens, who lives in Washington, for many years. He is a talented writer and enjoys iconic status among left-wing intellectuals, although his work exhibits too much casual misogyny for my taste. Last week he showed off his full intellectual powers in a Guardian column hailing the success of the bombing of Afghanistan. People who oppose the war were put in their place with a magisterial rebuke, which I quote in full: "Well, ha ha ha, and yah, boo." I'm not certain about the placing of that third comma, but columnists must agree to differ on such questions. I'm also less thrilled than Hitchens by the ousting of one group of murderers and rapists in Kabul by another, even if they do have a more relaxed dress code.

But it has been fascinating to watch him shift politically in recent weeks, heaping ad hominem abuse on "peaceniks" and making the demonstrably absurd claim that the US had no alternative to the bombing. One of Hitchens' friends, Barbara Olson, died on a hijacked plane on 11 September. Since then, rage against the terrorists has suffused his opinions, and anyone who does not agree with him is the enemy. His transformation is so complete that a friend of mine watched an entire edition of the BBC's Question Time 10 days ago under the impression that one of the panellists, clearly present to air his reactionary views, was Christopher. It was in fact his thoroughly delightful but ferociously right-wing brother, Peter.

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It has been quite a week for posturing. Hitchens (C) volunteered to go and kill future leaders of al-Qa'ida, while John Simpson told startled Radio 4 listeners on Tuesday morning that he had just taken Kabul. "It was BBC people who liberated the city – we got in ahead of the Northern Alliance," he declared. I suspect that taking cities in these circumstances is rather like taking my local Sainsbury's: the doors are open, you walk right in, and everyone is pleased to see you. Perhaps someone should give Simpson a reward card, with vouchers for every three cities he liberates. But he'd have to get it stamped by the enemy first.