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Before the excitement inevitably ebbs, it would be amusing and instructive to examine the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to President Obama, and of the granting of such recognition generally.
It is an irony, of course, that the prizes were endowed by the man who contributed directly to the deadliness of modern warfare by inventing dynamite in 1867, and his creation of the trust was in large measure an act of expiation. Since the establishment of the awards more than one hundred years ago, the selections and the process that has produced them have often been enveloped in controversy, almost always a result in any system that recognizes some achievements and ignores others.
There has been great criticism of the award to Obama, and even he was genuinely surprised by the selection. The principal complaint is that he did not actually do anything to warrant the recognition, and it is difficult to argue with that. But it is tough to find many other recipients of the Peace Prize who actually did anything either, and the fact that there has never been a year in which war wasn't raging somewhere drives one to the conclusion that the Nobel Peace Prize is an empty accolade.
Remember that granting recognition of any kind is a subjective evaluation made not by machines but by people, and people can never separate their biases from the process of decision. Every human endeavor is fraught with such subjectivity, and the more we try to empower decisions with the binomial accuracy of modern technology, the clearer it becomes that life's major decisions are based in large part on whim. Most people will spend more time trying to select between two tomatoes in a supermarket---a selection with very little monetary consequence---than they will to make a major choice: to spend thousands on a car or hundreds of thousands on a home. And please consider marriage, a significant life decision with no component other than emotion.
Although all decisions are subjective, the fuzziest are those that deal with fuzzy subjects. Many people think "The Grapes of Wrath" and Citizen Kane" to be among the best English-language motion pictures of all time, and yet neither won an Oscar for Best Picture. "Rocky," considered by many to be a genuinely awful movie, won the award in 1976.
The smallest number of arguments about selections of the Nobel committees have been about the sciences, and there are few who would deny the worthiness of Curie, Crick, Rutherford, Roentgen and a host of others whose efforts were measurable, productive and important to the human condition. But the awards for economics, literature and peace are especially contentious. No level of excellence in the study of micro- or macroeconomic excellence seems to have a positive impact on the economic well-being of the large majority of the world's population. Most people think that James Joyce created great literature, but Joyce was not a recipient. Read any Halldor Laxness? He received the Prize in 1955.
And the Peace Prize? Well, Yasser Arafat was a recipient, and the president's surprise at his own selection may be tinged with his understanding of Groucho Marx's remark that he would rather not be a member of a club that would have him as a member. Even the selection committee has had some understanding of the vaporous and vapid nature of the Peace Prize: it has resorted many times to its default selection, the Red Cross, and failed to select any winner about 20% of the time.
One can ascribe many motivations to the committee's selection: a commentary on the Bush administration; a commentary on American policy; an attempt to move American policy in a specific direction; it genuinely believes Obama merits the award; it just likes Obama. Any may be the case---or they may all be the case.
It is probably too extreme to say that being selected for the Nobel Peace Prize means nothing. That is surely true in a practical sense, and in President Obama's case the things that he may do---or not do---during the remainder of his tenure may give some on the selection committee a case of buyer's remorse. But the Nobel Peace Prize is really no more than a pat on the back and, except for the money, is worth no more than that.
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I advocate nothing of the kind. My advice is that one should expect very little in the way of justice in a procedure that is not designed to administer it.
