This war presents familiar scenes and old debates. Soldiers return from overseas to the embrace of waiting family. The war’s defenders celebrate these “just warriors,” while critics still wonder: “Where are the weapons of mass destruction?” But war continually confounds the usual narratives. Chris Hedges, formerly a war correspondent for The New York Times, spoke recently at the College of the Atlantic about his new book, “War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.” (WERU will rebroadcast the talk at 10 a.m. Wednesday, May 28.) His work poses fresh challenges to war supporters and opponents alike.

Hedges is appalled by war. He has been witness to more than the suffering it brings. Losers give their lives, but winners also pay an enduring cost. Often they are permanently altered by its brutality. War occasions and expresses a deeply rooted capacity for violence, a capacity that can itself become addictive. Once the demons of war are unleashed, soldiers ravage more than military foes. Even for those soldiers who do not directly perpetrate massacres, participation in violence that kills vast numbers of fellow human beings leaves enduring guilt. Nonetheless, soldiers return to a world ill-prepared to deal with their capacity for violence and-or deeply repressed guilt and anxiety.

Yet Hedges does not harbor easy dreams that war will soon become obsolete. His book was completed before the invasion of Iraq, but he supported U.S. intervention in the Balkans: No advanced democratic state that purports to hold humane values can stand by while innocents are being slaughtered.

War, however, speaks to and grows out of existential insecurities. Whether historians adjudge the Bush Administration guilty of manipulating evidence of Iraqi weapons, Hedges’ analysis suggests that the rush to war is greased by long- standing needs and anxieties. Modern wars affirm the virtue of the nation state. In a world in which God and an afterlife have a less secure and salient presence than they once did, nationalism has come to fill a void: “Lurking beneath the surface of every society, including our own, is the passionate yearning for a nationalist cause that exalts us, the kind that war alone is able to deliver. It reduces and at times erases the anxiety of individual consciousness.”

Both perpetrators and victims of modern warfare construct nationalistic narratives that Hedges labels myths. In the midst of the breakup of Yugoslavia, nationalistic warlords worked to wipe out all record of cooperation among ethnic groups. All sides then portrayed themselves as innocent victims of unprovoked aggression. Hedges shows that even history’s clear victims seldom acknowledge let alone redress the role of collaborators in their midst or of any activities that might have evoked anger.

Violence and counter violence build on each other, but for Hedges the story is not unequivocally bleak. Human beings may have a fascination with death and suffering, but they also have a capacity for love. Hedges uses the term Eros to describe this love, but, following one of his inspirations, Reinhold Niebuhr, I would prefer a more subtle distinction here.

Niebuhr contrasted Eros, or the possessive love often associated with modern romance and the nuclear family, with agape, a Greek term for complete self-giving love, as displayed by Jesus upon the cross. Love in this sense translates into an appreciation for and acceptance of the infinite particulars within our national and international communities. Agape cannot be fully realized within history, for distinctions must be made, standards enacted, and certain ways of life proscribed. Nonetheless, agape can stand as a perpetual challenge, highlighting the limits and exclusions of any consensus and challenging us to do better.

I take from Hedges the message that if there is an answer to the world’s violence, it lies neither in just war theory nor in pacifism as usually conceived. The best one can ever say of any war is that it was a tragic necessity. The slightly less immoral triumphed over even more vicious opponents. Victors can never lay claim to the mantle of justice. If the scope and number of wars are to be reduced, victors and victims of historic conflicts need to embark upon the deeply political and never final process of building common memories.

Yet part of building common memories in the midst of or after conflict must be an acknowledgement that human memory itself is imperfect. Our best-intentioned recollections and efforts to build consensus can never be fully adequate to our pasts or our complex and evolving instincts. So we are charged to build with humility. We need foundations capacious enough to enact common standards amidst an acknowledgment that we may never fully agree on all aspects of the historic record and must be open to future revisions as new injustices inevitably come to light. Agape is a continuing moral imperative. A broader and deeper politics within and between nations is its modern political manifestation and instrument.

John Buell lives in Southwest Harbor. A longer version of this essay may be found at www.commondreams.org.