A simple illustration of how our judgement is influenced by past expectations and conventions is to look at how people interpret the supposed ‘meaning’ of stories.

It’s probably impossible not to conceive some kind of meaning in events, whether they occur in the real world or on the big screen, so these meanings can become an important part of our life, framing and colouring the way we perceive other events – influencing the way we conceive other meanings.

We could argue endlessly about the meaning of life, and about meanings of particular events within life, without ever reaching any kind of resolution or common ground, because there is no objective authority to say who’s wrong.

But when we talk about the meaning of stories, which are written and told and performed by artists, we can at least defer authority to what the artists claim to be their intended meaning. Although this still won’t help everyone agree on a common meaning (partly because artists and writers may miss significant meanings in their own work), the artists can at least remind us that such meanings were unintended.

Being reminded that meanings are largely unintended encourages us to loosen up our beliefs and opinions (which I’m arguing is good) and pay more attention to what’s really important and what solutions are immediately available. Accidents and coincidences are inevitable. Stuff happens, which may or may not have anything to do with anything else. We should always keep in mind that ‘what something means’ is foremost ‘what something means to oneself’; any more general meaning is something to be publicly and objectively worked out.

I think the point of trying to work out meanings of stories in public is to enlighten the biases and tacit assumptions we project into our interpretations. When we publicize what we conceive as the meaning of something, and see that it’s different from the meanings conceived by others, we can begin to ask why such differences occurred – we can reverse engineer our ideas and beliefs.

By reverse engineering our ideas, beliefs, and interpretations, we learn more about our most important values, we begin to make our assumptions more articulate, more objective and manageable, which helps us communicate and collaborate with others, to develop a more coherent and effective system of social meaning. In other words, articulation helps generate agreement: it becomes a framework or ground for generative conversations.

The other benefit of stories is that they provide clearly defined, shared points of reference. In stories, the terms for determining meaning are given to everyone (although particular parts may be intended to suggest outside events, and therefore have meanings that only some people may appreciate). Stories provide opportunities to practice working out meanings through conversation.

The story I’m going to use to illustrate my point is Paul Haggis’s recent film, In the Valley of Elah.

I must admit that I saw In the Valley of Elah with the deliberate intention of integrating it into last week’s post on the nature of war and peace. I hoped that it had something like the meaning I was looking for: it didn’t – not exactly. There was enough in it that I could have projected my hoped-for meaning onto it, but there was also too much more to contradict (or at least weaken) that meaning. Instead, I let it ‘settle’ for another week, to see what new insights may work themselves out.

Before I go any farther, let me make clear that I’m not necessarily trying to work out Haggis’s intended meaning (whatever exactly that may have been). From interviews it seems that Haggis did in fact have an intentional message, but it was quite ambiguous — more about asking questions — and secondary to the main task of presenting a compelling story. I can imagine him repeating what Henrik Ibsen said about Hedda Gabler:

“It was not my desire to deal in this play with so-called problems. What I wanted to do was to depict human beings, human emotions, and human destinies, upon a general groundwork of certain social conditions and principles of the day.”

Of course, the “social conditions and principles of the day” look a lot like problems…

If we read any messages into In the Valley of Elah, let’s at least include this one: be careful about reading too much into meanings, especially meanings based on old assumptions and expectations… It’s just about characters – people – whose actions and statements aren’t necessarily any more (or less) symbolic than yours or mine.

This is how the art of storytelling originated in the first place: real events seemed to symbolize or mean something above and beyond themselves, whether that meaning is practical, political, or religious; consider Homer, the Bible, as well as all of the old mythologies, texts, and oral traditions from different cultures.

Think of how much longevity and universality the story of David and Goliath has; think of how strange it really is that the spontaneous actions and decisions of a few people around thirty centuries ago continue to have such a powerful meaning today.

So because real events are meaningful, and the meaningfulness of real events is where storytelling originated from, and thus the purpose of telling stories is largely to manage meaning, then it is not unreasonable to expect filmmakers (who are storytellers) to pay special attention to the meaningfulness of their work.

Now stories that have just one ambiguous meaning are boring (at least to most adults); it’s condescending. What we want is combinations of meanings so our imaginations can participate in the dramatic process. The best storytellers roughly suggest or sketch a body of meaning, and encourage the audience to complete the rest.

Haggis seems willing to make the meanings in his films bold; but they are not necessarily symbolic (at least not for purposes outside of the drama), they are not necessarily any more than a sketch (albeit one made with thick strokes), and they are no less complex or ambiguous than those that may (or may not) be found in postmodern pseudo-dramas. Having bold meanings in a film doesn’t make it ideological; they may simply make the film more dramatic, more deeply engaging – working the same way as powerful emotions, distinctive characters, and astonishing events.

The meanings in Crash may have been a bit too bold, thus becoming a distraction (especially to viewers who can’t tolerate ambiguity), in the same way that special effects or emotional outbursts can distract from the overall impression of a story. I think In the Valley of Elah is much more balanced and effective in this way.

In the Valley of Elah’s most obvious instances of symbolic meaning are the flag, and, of course, the story of David and Goliath, from which the film takes its name. It is reasonable to assume the latter has some kind of general or overall significance, but I can’t distinguish what that is. Who or what is David? Who’s Goliath? Where or what is the Valley of Elah?

The character who seems the most David-like is Detective Emily Sanders, played by Charlize Theron. She’s the only one who wins any kind of victory in the end. But she apparently needed the encouragement of Hank Deerfield, played Tommy Lee Jones – who is the most David-like up until the final moments – to get her up to it. And her victory is much more personal; it isn’t the kind of victory that breeds widespread hope – it didn’t seem to make Hank all that hopeful.

The analogy then seems to be not between real characters or things, but rather between the general setting: the film takes us into a metaphorical Valley of Elah – a moment of deep confusion and distress – and ends before David enters the story.

This brings us to the other major instance of symbolism: the flag. First, I should say we need to remember that this isn’t necessarily a message from Haggis. For the writer/director, it may not symbolize anything more than “The End.”

There’s no reason to believe it’s supposed to refer to events outside of the film . On the other hand, it is meaningful in a less direct way – the same way that real events can be meaningful – to help us work with other circumstances more effectively. As I said earlier, this is how people began telling stories in the first place – to preserve and manage meaning.

So the “sign of distress” doesn’t necessarily come from Haggis (though it probably does). I mean, if anything, it’s more of a gesture than a statement. While the whole story is obviously extremely relevant to real-world events, it doesn’t necessarily refer to them in any specific, unambiguous way. We can use art to lead us to real insights, but if we read too much into it, then it becomes misleading abuse.

Anyways, we know that for Hank, the flag gesture is very symbolic: he’s the one who explains what it means – and it’s important enough to him that he goes out of his way to do so. But we can’t assume he knew exactly what he was doing either. It may have been merely an admission of confusion (from someone who isn’t accustomed to being confused or out of control), a gesture of last resort, symbolizing “I don’t know what else there is to do.”

I think it may be significant that the flag is in front of a school (I believe). Hank might have meant his gesture to symbolize his concerns about the fate of younger generations – if not the helplessness of children, his own inability to help them, or even understand what kind of help they might need.

On this theme – inter-generational relations, ie. differences – is where I think In the Valley of Elah becomes the most meaningful. The undertones occur throughout the film: there’s nobody from Hank’s generation left on the base, comments about changes in investigative styles, a demonstration of changes in parenting styles. And in the entire investigation, what was the only thing Hank was ever wrong about?

This also addresses Hank’s flashbacks – his apparent worries about whether or not he did what he could to help his son. Despite all of the little things he was able to do – like advice about staying warm on sentry duty – he was unable to help his son in the way he needed it the most. Not only did he fail to help him, but after he realized his failure, he still didn’t know how he might have possibly helped him: he was helpless himself in this regard.

So this is where the film leaves us: in the Valley of Elah with Hank, a soldier whose time has passed, and who can’t even imagine how to address the problems of a new age. And it would seem to be a rather miserable and discouraging way to end. But there’s hope.

The hope comes from reminding ourselves of the rest of what happened in the Biblical Valley of Elah: the arrival of David.

David doesn’t have to be anyone in particular, just ‘youth’ – anyone who doesn’t know enough to ‘know better,’ who doesn’t know enough to be confused and afraid, people who don’t carry a heavy burden of past assumptions and conventions, who are willing to deal with problems in a much more immediate and simplified way.

I’m sort of saying a few things at once here – about the film, about war, and about life in general. Or rather, I’m using the film to help illustrate what I try to say in every one of my other essays. I’m saying that complex and ambiguous circumstances – whether in a movie or in real life – are often made unmanageable by past experience.

Our old conventions and assumptions (our armour and weapons) interfere with our ability to deal with present and future problems. Sometimes the most effective approach is naive, and the best weapons and tools can be found right at our feet – if we’re only willing to look, and to calmly walk down and face our difficulties with clear-eyed confidence.

This essay isn’t intended to be just an interpretation of In the Valley of Elah; in fact, it probably misses much of the film’s intended message. What I’m trying to do is begin resolving, or at least appreciating, some of the problems — the “social conditions” — the film touches on. As in my past essays, I’m trying to do this in a really simple, unadorned way, free of the burdensome assumptions and conventions of past generations.

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A coincidence of events this week has led me to a surprising (and perhaps controversial) insight: war is not as complex as it may seem; at least compared to times of peace, it may even be fairly simple.

During war there is a concentration of purpose. When we’re not at war, activity is less focussed, purpose is diffused among a multitude of perspectives and causes; what I mean is that everybody is too concerned with their own personal matters, seen from within their own perspectives, to even recognize that a ‘bigger picture’ exists: we don’t appreciate the full scale of life because there’s hardly any reason or cause to look out and consider it, there are few signs that such generalities are real at all.

Whereas during war, the little pockets of moral and intellectual security we inhabit are exploded, compelling us to receive a more comprehensive impression of life, albeit life of a simpler mode – organized around a single public cause, or a few publicly shared catastrophies – compared to the complex and almost incomprehensible flourishing variety of creative activities in peace. One of these creative activities is to personally imagine that we actually understand – or at least that somewhere somebody understands – ‘what it’s all about.’ It only seems simple because we’re free to create the conditions (the routines, conventions, and ideals) in which we may imagine it is so.

These personal ‘pockets’ of life are much like Plato’s allegorical cave; but since we construct them ourselves, with no regard to what may be outside them, there is no entrance or exit through which to climb into the general light of knowledge. Instead, these pockets slowly disintegrate or crash against each other, blinding us by the light that is then allowed to penetrate through inconvenient gaps and cracks. And instead of learning to adust to this light, we cover our eyes while attempting to patch the holes, or we retreat to an even smaller pocket.

It is partly because of that irresponsibility that wars happen; it’s almost as if some higher powers use war as a way to reorganize the mess made by our disordered mass of jerry-rigged routines and ideals – the incompatibilities generated during long periods of specialized ignorance.

No new elements are introduced to life in times of war; what happens is that a few factors become amplified (which were always there, either latent, or covertly working behind the scenes), they become more distinguishable and important. These distinct factors help us recognize a few vague outlines of a bigger picture. Because the more complex picture of peace is rarely noticed, the war-picture is the biggest and most complex view we ever see in a truly general light; this is why war has the reputation of being difficult to understand – because it is the only general problem that most people even attempt to understand.

Before I continue, let me say that I’m worried that these suggestions may seem disrespectful to soldiers, victims, and their families, especially those who’ve lost loved ones, especially those who bear a complex emotional burden. But the complex emotional burden of death – the burden of loss and confusion and anger with life and one’s God – is experienced even in the most peaceful times. This is why I hesitate to juxtapose war with peace: victimization and violence have rarely been very far away in even the most ‘peaceful’ times – and if there wasn’t intentional violence, then there have at least always been cruel accidents. The safer we seemingly are, the more shockingly these events effect us – and it may be partly because of this that we choose to go on indefinite moral vacations whenever it’s immediately affordable to do so, I mean, whenever there are no urgent general problems.

My favourite example of this kind of protectionism is in the Paul Haggis’s Crash. It’s easy to mistakenly simplify Crash as ‘about racism.’ (In fact, such a simplification is itself an example of how we tend to retreat from complex problems – in this case, a number of semi-related dramatic episodes, which are really about (if they are ‘about’ anything at all) the challenge of human relations in an interconnected world of strangers – and cover the complexity with an encompassing conclusion.) But racist ideas are only one specific way in which we use routines, conventions, and ideals to shield us from more complex, general problems: a racist belief is one kind of over-simplified ‘encompassing conclusion’; racism is one way people attempt to shield themselves from complexity, rather than working with it directly, in the full light of fact and reason.

The opening lines of Crash (which I don’t remember exactly) suggest that cars – our “boxes of glass and steel” – symbolize roughly the same kind of security zone that I’m talking about. One result is that our sense of security is just as artificial as the boxes we create to maintain that sense; we still can’t avoid unforeseeable accidents, and we might even become so preoccupied by security that we miss the more immanent dangers right under our feet, as demonstrated by Sandra Bullock’s character. Another result, which is suggested rather explicitly in the film’s opening lines, is that we may become so isolated and enclosed that we feel inclined to crash into each other just to feel alive.

That’s clearly a symbolic exaggeration, but it seems possible that circumstances may be too safe in some cases, thus draining them of the vital qualities that make life worth living. This is a fuzzy area; we’re getting into ideas about human nature that are difficult prove – difficult even to articulate without excessive vagueness. But consider the willingness – or rather, the enthusiasm – with which young people, especially in the first half of the twentieth century, have signed up to fight in wars in faraway places. For a seventeen year-old rural or small-town boy, war is way to feel alive, an adventure, an escape from boredom and routine, an opportunity to grow up. (This was the main motive for enlisting given by one of the veterans interviewed in Ken Burns’s The War, which is currently airing on PBS.)

Of course, this is far from a universal sentiment, especially in North America and Europe in the past few decades; but there is no questioning that at least some young people feel this way, and that the actual outbreak of war may depend largely on what proportion of the population exhibits such enthusiasm.

Working from a different perspective, the institutions and conventions that make life regulated, satisfying, and secure for some people, make it rather distressing and perhaps even dangerous for others. This may be a more prominent motive for those enlisting in the US armed forces in the past few decades. Risking one’s life overseas may be the only way to escape risking one’s life in the gang warfare right in one’s own neighbourhood. Another motive may be anomie – a kind of social disconnectedness, alienation, or inability to identify with the activities or values of one’s environment. (I would like to have looked at Robert Pape’s Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, but it was unavailable to me at the time of writing.)

In other words (if you’ll forgive my grossly simplified generalizing), people go to war for two reasons: (a) life is too simple, or (b) life is too complex. Both reasons can be generalized into the same explanation: people need to feel like they have some kind of control, or effect, or relevance, or importance in the circumstances around them.

Those for whom life is too simple – the small-town boys who enlist to fight in search of adventure – the world seems to be a smooth and continuously rounded surface: life has no edge, there is nothing to climb on or grab or sink one’s teeth into. Those for whom life is too complex – like impoverished urban youths, confused idealists, and those who’ve had war brought to them – the world is nothing but edges, with apparently no coherent order, and no consistent surface on which to find a secure footing.

I’m going to dwell on this a little longer, because it is the heart of my case – and the direction of much more of my work that is yet to take shape. It represents an attempt to conceive a new general conception of human nature; though the word ‘new’ is perhaps too strong. What a layperson like me might call the ‘gist’ of this conception has been developing in the human sciences (including management theory) for decades, and it has been approximated by philosophers and poets for as long as there have been philosophers and poets.

What I’m talking about is simply the will to be – not just to exist, but to recognize and be certain of one’s own existence. It isn’t enough for people to be physically alive, we must also experience ourselves in the act of living, we need to see reminders in the world that we’re there – that we have some real importance or effect in life – and that the world would be different without us in it. In 1959, psychologist Robert White introduced something like this as “effectance motivation,” and associated it with the aim or need for personal competence.

[I’ll have to leave a more thorough account until a future essay. In the mean time, any interested or sceptical non-psychologists may want to read Jonathan Haidt’s Happiness Hypothesis, especially chapter ten. I also highly recommend the work of Mihaly Csikzsentmihalyi; see Flow, or the more philosophical Evolving Self, or the more practical and business-oriented Good Business. See also Edward Deci & Richard Flaste's Why We Do What We Do, for a popular introduction to 'intrinsic motivation.' With respect to professional psychologists, first forgive what may seem like careless tramping and disregard for conventional methods and assumptions. But consider how changes outside of the profession may soon be important within it. Technology and business (especially ‘Web 2.0' and ‘Enterprise 2.0') may provide the kind of vivid illustrations, dynamic models, and open metaphors needed to establish a more ‘humanist’ psychology: Maslow himself admitted in The Farther Reaches of Human Nature that his ideas were only a rough initial survey, with an inadequate vocabulary and background, which may take decades to develop.]

But our everyday intuitive understanding of human motives is still largely effected by Marxian, Nietzschean, and Freudian notions of power struggle, domination, master and slave moralities, resentment and sublimation, all understood through archaic industrial metaphors. So we tend to generate over-simplified explanations of wars and violence, which seem to take the people-as-machines metaphors a bit too literally: a “boiling-over point” of “pent-up hostility,” “imbalance of power,” “clash of civilizations,” and even my earlier mention of “crashing into each other just to feel alive.” These metaphors help to distil complexity and clear away much of the confusion, but none of them can ever be the cause war, nor even the cause of some specific war. (I may not be able to make a case for treating this as a general fallacy, but for an outline of the problems involved in some of the most popular explanations of war and peace, see The Causes of War by Geoffrey Blainey.)

Another difficulty that inhibits our understanding of war and peace – especially in our own time of individual terrorists, informal networks, and asymmetrical warfare – is that we have trouble conceiving it apart from conceptions of cohesive and distinct governments and groups, with centralized systems of authority and a rigidly defined chains of command. But even if we look at the First World War, when war hostilities were apparently precipitated in the most mechanical way possible – according to predetermined treaties, agreements, and railroad timetables – individual human factors were nevertheless the most important determinant: timetables and treaties still require people willing to follow them (or unwilling to rewrite them), and in the case of the First World War, many people were not merely willing, but fully confident, and even enthusiastic to begin fighting. (See Niall Ferguson’s Pity of War.)

My earlier discussion of motives focussed mainly on soldiers and citizens; but it’s probably even more important to consider the psychology of those in positions of leadership and significant influence. It would a mistake to assume that leaders make purely rational decisions.

I’m sceptical that anybody is capable of blocking-out emotional sentiments to become totally objective; and even the most objective decision-makers are unlikely to have access to all of the facts, or to manage to organize and evaluate all of those facts in their proper order of significance: this is something that usually takes historians decades, even centuries, to sort out. (Which was pointed out by historian Margaret MacMillan in her series of public lectures on “the uses and abuses of history” at UWO this past week.) Besides, especially in democracies, leadership decisions are largely compelled by public opinion; in other words, policy decisions are largely compelled by emotional sentiments – or even more obscurely, by an interpretation of sentiments rendered in aggregate and abstract forms.

So leaders have a lot of information to cope with. And they can’t just postpone a decision until they’re sure all the facts are in (because that may never happen). Leaders are expected to do something as leaders; they’re there to make decisions, so decisions must eventually be made. And in times of great uncertainty and danger, it often appears that going to war is “the only option.”

Now this is the whole point of this article: I’m going to suggest that we consider that in many cases – such as America’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003, and more obviously in the aggressive tendencies of most dictatorial regimes – a decision to make war, or to at make war-like postures, has less to do with real conditions and supposed premises (like perceived threats posed by other regimes), and has more to do with the psychological need to demonstrate competence.

So I’m suggesting that war is a result of human nature, but I’m not suggesting that human nature is inherently violent, power-driven, resentful, or war-like. Leaders go to war as a way to make circumstances understandable; war is an escape from complexity. War is a retreat to position of artificial or forced simplicity.

Of course, it isn’t really so simple. I must be careful not to become too attached to the apparent simplicity of my own ‘encompassing conclusions,’ which may accomplish little more than to satisfy my will to be involved in circumstances. Complicating matters, we must also consider the motives of revolutionaries and tyrants – the Robespierres and Napoleons – whose reasons for fighting develop long before they become leaders, and therefore don’t seem to fit my hypothesis. But people may establish a habit or position of forced simplicity early in life – either as an ideology or an aggressive attitude, or a combination of both – which becomes a life-long strategy that happens to work successfully for a given person in a given time and place, which helps them attain power, which gives them an opportunity to project their aggressive ideology and attitude (their personality, their will to be) into a larger-scale.

There’s a lot more I want to say about this, but none of it quite seems to fit what I’ve already said here. So I invite anyone to suggest comments and criticisms. Meanwhile, forgive me as I clumsily add a few more comments before trailing off.

Margaret MacMillan mentioned Michael Howard during Thursday’s lecture, which led me to take a look at his book, The Invention of Peace, hoping to find some insight into these ideas. On the first page he quotes Sir Henry Maine: “War appears to be as old as mankind, but peace is a modern invention.” In the next paragraph Howard adds, “Peace may or may not be ‘a modern invention,’ but it is certainly a far more complex affair than war,” and (as he says later in the book) peace is “artificial, intricate and highly volatile.”

My theory of war and peace is not very different from others that have already been put forward; like the one that led Norman Angell to believe that sensible and civilized people would never fight another war again – which he published in 1910.

Angell believed – like Thomas Friedman today – that the kind of impulses that lead people into war could be satisfied through industry, culture, and trade; and people would avoid fighting any major wars because they would not want to risk their more peaceful enterprises. But I think what happened then – just as I fear might happen, or hope will not happen in the future – is that the industrial and commercial enterprises progressed beyond people’s ability to understand and control them. So they may have actually defeated their own purpose.

You may notice in the rest of my work, that fighting for an effective balance, trying to understand the complex dynamics of all of our routines and conventions, and warning people of the dangers of not understanding, is my mission – my “moral equivalent of war.”

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