How many different ways can you miss the mark? As I have previously written in some detail, missing the mark is viewed in the Bible already as a metaphorical expression for one of the four different types of ways that one can sin, where some sort of virtuous standard of behavior is what one is aiming at and one’s behavior falls short of that noble standard in some fashion. As might well be understood, the metaphor itself springs from the military tradition of archery and related fighting techniques where one fought with ranged weapons and hit a target either successfully or not. By the time that we find the expression in familiar sources, therefore, there was already a literal and a figurative meaning of missing the mark. Originally, the expression comes from the arms training of the ancient world where accuracy in firing ranged weapons was a matter of life and death in both hunting as well as warfare, a meaning that goes back well into prehistory. Then, naturally enough, missing the mark became an expression for not hitting a metaphorical and abstract target that one was aiming at.

From these two meanings, the expression was already a complex one thousands of years ago, but as one might imagine, there are still some shared domains that these two existing meanings have that are not shared with all senses of this expression. For one, let us note that in both the military and the moral uses of the expression missing (or hitting) the target, intentionality is required. Yet there are ways that one can miss the mark without one’s own particular intentionality being involved. Let us consider two ways that this may be the case. When one is a student, one’s grades are sometimes considered to be marks, and one can miss the mark in the sense of receiving poor grades without having any personal intention of receiving good grades. To be sure, there may be other people, like one’s parents or teachers, that may wish for a student to succeed at learning, but that does not mean that all students wish to receive good marks. A large number of people attend school not out of any intrinsic interest in learning but simply because it is expected or even required that they attend school, whatever their own feelings or inclinations are in the matter.

A similar case is involved when we see missing the mark with regards to political targets. Marks or targets are not only matters or morals or the use of arrows and darts and spears or related weapons but also with such abstract matters as carbon dioxide or inflation or unemployment levels. Politicians frequently promise to their potential voters as well as to other world leaders (and also institutions like the World Bank or IMF) that their nations will achieve some or another target in some sort of schedule. Sometimes there may be a real intention to do so, but such an intention need not be assumed. While people may sincerely wish to be elected or re-elected to some office, it cannot be assumed that they are serious about the specific promises that they make in order to obtain or maintain power. Not infrequently, political leaders make contradictory promises about targets and levels to different constituencies. On the one hand, a political leader may promise to other leaders in a place like Davos that their government is committed to lowering the levels of greenhouse gases in order to deal with the threat of anthropogenic climate change. On the other hand, though, this same leader will often promise to their own people that they will not do anything that will threaten the nation’s economy or the well-being of the people who have voted them into power. These sorts of contradictory targets require that the person making them is either immensely ignorant of the reality of the situation or is not seriously intending to meet at least one of those targets. Similar issues are at play when political leaders simultaneously promise not to harm social welfare spending to angry but impoverished voters and also promise to slash budget deficits to lenders of last resort propping up their nations’ failing economies, where it may be fairly wondered if either promise is being made with serious intentions.

Not all aspects of missing the mark need to be as serious as what we have discussed so far. In all of the cases that we have discussed, missing the mark can be a matter of life and death or extreme suffering at the very least for those people who suffer harm as a result of a mark being missed. Whether one is thinking about physical life and death through mishaps in using weapons, the threat of damnation for missing the mark in a moral sense, or the misery that results from misgovernment on the well-being of people, or the failed prospects in life that often come from miseducation, not all aspects of missing the mark are as serious as these. Earlier this evening, as I write this, I was listening to an account of the making of a seminal alternative album, the debut album by Wheezer, affectionately known as the “Blue Album,” and this documentary video made the point that Wheezer’s frontman, one Rivers Cuomo, intended that his band and its debut album be seen as a momentous and serious album of heartbreak like the albums of Nirvana, when the band was universally considered to be self-deprecatory nerds whose sense of humor differentiated them from the many overly serious bands of their age, much to the chagrin of the band themselves. Even in such a comparatively unimportant aspect of missing the mark, where someone fails to communicate their intentions and goals to others, and is judged exactly the opposite as one would hope and wish, can cause a great deal of suffering. When marks are missed, someone suffers, no matter in what sense those marks are missed.