by Akim Reinhardt
I’ve always found the notion of a handful of Swedes deciding the world’s best anything to be ludicrous, even laughable. Well, not always. When I was a kid, a teenager, I thought the Nobel Prizes must be important and mean something. But by my twenties, they had started to seem like a joke.
Nothing against Sweden or its fine denizens, of course. A lot of us would probably very much enjoy living there. But that’s precisely because it’s hard to think of a country less representative of the global human experience. Almost any other country you could name is a truer sampling of the global human experience than this one, with its roughly 0.1% of humanity perched near the top of the world.
I don’t know. Maybe it’s different in the sciences. Maybe in that realm a Nobel Prize signifies something other than an ego trip and a fat check. I’m no scientist. I don’t even really understand how gravity works; if you told me it’s because there’s some big ‘ole magnet at the center of the Earth holding us down, I’d probably muse: “Huh, should probably get a little more iron in my diet.”
How ‘bout that. Turns out there is a big ‘ole magnet at the center of the Earth. Pass the brocolli.
Maybe Nobel laureate Richard Feynman was just kidding when in his memoir he named a chapter about the Nobel Prize in Physics: “Alfred Nobel’s Other Mistake” (his invention of dynamite being the other). Perhaps in the sciences the Nobel is a meaningful brand of lifetime achievement award for worthy scientists who have made important contributions to our understanding and applications of physics, chemistry and biology/medicine. But not geology, oceanography, mathematics, or a bunch of other sciences. Cause fuck those branches of science?
I don’t know. At least they’re not handing out Nobels to the social sciences. How ridiculous would that be?
Oh wait. They are. But not. Kinda. It’s confusing. Because since 1968 there’s been this bullshit Nobel in the field of Economic “Sciences.” I say “kinda” because it wasn’t created by, and for a long time its winners were not picked by, the Swedish academy in charge of the “real” Nobel prizes for (some of the) real sciences. Rather, the official name of the Economics Nobel is the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.
That’s right. In 1968, the Sweden’s Central Bank decided to celebrate not Alfred Nobel, but its own 300th anniversary, by hitching its wagon to the Nobel prizes and inventing a prize in economics named “in honor” of Alfred Nobel. At least one Nobel descendent, human rights lawyer Peter Nobel, thinks its an embarrassment and a sham. Personally, I’m not sure what’s funnier: pretending that economists serve, in Alfred Nobel’s words, “the greatest benefit on mankind,” or that they are actual scientists.
However, if we put (some of) the natural sciences and that one wannabe science aside, what’s left are literature and peace. You know. The famous ones, and the only ones that most people outside the sciences care about, or can name any winners of other than Albert Einstein.
I believe prizes in subjective artistic endeavors such as the arts are inherently stupid. Thus, I could not care less about who wins Nobel Prizes in Literature. Just like I don’t care who wins Grammys, Toneys, Emmies, or Oscars. Indeed, I can’t even be bothered to look up the correct spellings of those awards.
While I think the Nobel prizes are very unimportant, perusing the list of former Nobel Literature winners can certainly produce some chuckles. Yes, of course, some truly brilliant writers have won the award. But the list of winners also features a lot of Huh? And begs the question: Does this prize really signify the best of the best from around the world over the last century and a quarter?
Given that these awards started way back in 1901, during the heyday of Europe’s racialized imperial project, it’s unsurprising that the pre-WWII roster of winners is underwhelming and downright provincial. Barring some notable stand outs (W.B. Yeats, E. O’Neil, T. Mann, G.B. Shaw), it’s almost entirely Europeans that almost no one reads anymore, or certainly almost no one outside the authors’ respective home countries. But that’s okay. It’s a long way from Stockholm to the rest of the world. It took the Swedes a while to espy the larger world through the lens of quaint, racist stereotypes offered up by the likes of Pearl S. Buck (1938) and Winston Churchill (1953). In all, it took the Swedish Academy 68 years to award the Lit prize to second non-white author. By which time they’d handed it out to a baker’s dozen of Scandinavian authors, with several more to come! Clearly the best of the best.
And then came Dylan. No, not Dylan Thomas, who never won one. Rather, Bob Dylan.
I laughed for months.
But the real wellspring of folly is the Nobel Peace Prize. And Sweden’s largely off the hook for this one.
When Sweden’s Alfred Nobel died in 1896, he was worth about $200,000,000 in today’s money, which he had largely accrued by inventing, manufacturing, and selling dynamite. His final will set aside 96% of his fortune for the eponymous awards. At the time, Norway was not an independent country. It had been gobbled up by Sweden in 1814, and would not regain its independence until 1905. Nobel designated Sweden (eventually through the Swedish Academy) to choose all of the Nobel Prize winners except for one: The Peace Prize. For whatever reason, he allocated that choice to Norway. Peace Prize winners are selected by the Norwegian Nobel Committee, which is made up of five members, each chosen by the Norwegian Parliament.
How could that possibly produce politicized outcomes?
Some of the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s highlights over the years include:
• The 1906 Peace Prize given to Teddy Roosevelt, a strident imperialist and unabashed warmonger who coined the term “Gunboat Diplomacy.”
• The 1919 prize to Woodrow Wilson, who: illegally sold munitions to Great Britain during WWI despite U.S. neutrality, which directly lead to the death of about 1,200 civilians on the Lusitania in 1915; repeatedly lied to the American people to con them into joining that war (which they really had no business joining); and employed brutal repressive measures against American pacificists, including imprisonment, torture, and state censorship and propaganda. But hey, the ultimately ineffective League of Nations, which the United States never actually joined, was his idea, so I guess that counts.
• Then there were the Quakers (1947). You know. Like, all of them.
• And who could forget naming genocidal war criminal Henry Kissinger co-winner in 1973, along with his North Vietnamese diplomatic adversary Lê Đuc Tho. That was kinda’ like giving it to both, a wife and the husband who savagely beats her. Quite understandably, Lê Đuc Tho told the Nobel folks to shove their peace prize where the sun don’t shine, so Kissinger got to accept the award in Oslo all by his lonesome.
• And of course there was the complete joke of picking Barack Obama in 2009, mere months after he’d been inaugurated, and who’d done virtually nothing to deserve it other than be half-black. Come, look at the expression of mild embarrassment on his face while accepting the award.
And those are just the embarrassing Nobel Peace Prizes handed out to Americans. Dubious winners not from the United States include:
Mother Theresa (1979). Last of the great white savior Nobels, she was fond of: lying to Muslims and Hindus as they laid dying, secretly baptizing them without their consent; intentionally giving her poor and dying patients insufficient food and substandard medical care, even denying them aspirin at times, because she thought suffering brings one closer to God, even as she sought top tier medical treatment in the West; and accepting donations from truly awful people such as Haitian dictator Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, then investing her organization’s millions in the Vatican Bank instead of using it to improve conditions for her suffering patients because, again, it’s good that they suffer. And I guess good that the Vatican have more millions.
Aung San Su Kyi (1991). Always an ethnic nationalist, Su Kyi eventually made the Nobel Committee proud, championing the values of peace by openly overseeing the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya people from Myanmar, even as it was accompanied by systematic rape and mass murder. And like any good war criminal, she promoted the erasure of her victims; at one point she even asked the U.S. ambassador to refrain from using the very word “Rohingya.”
F.W. de Klerk (1993). Apparently the Norwegians learned nothing from the Kissinger/Lê Đuc Tho fiasco, so they co-awarded the peace prize to Nelson Mandela and to one of the South African apartheid overlords. Seriously.
Yasser Arafat/Yitzak Rabin/Shimon Peres (1994). 0-for-3 in a single year is actually quite impressive.
And that brings us to the most recent winner: María Corina Machado of Venezuela.
There’s a lot to admire about Machado. Fighting for democracy and against the tyrannical rule of dictators Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro took great courage. But just how far are you willing to go to get what you want? How hypocritical are you willing to be, sucking up to one would-be dictator who is actively destroying democratic institutions and norms, in hopes of using him as a lever against your own dictator? Is the world’s preeminent peace prize meant to highlight how the ends justify the means?
I actually began writing this essay before Machado took the extraordinary step of handing her Nobel Prize over to Donald Trump like it was a belated birthday card; before Trump, who in a public display that was truly bizarre even by his standards, gleefully accepted it as if it were his own; and before most of the world mocked Trump for doing this, and then in a fit, Trump told the Prime Minister of Norway he would seize Greenland because Norway had not given him a Nobel Peace Prize.
Before any of that.
Rather, I began writing this essay when Machado was merely sucking up to Trump in generic ways centered around publicly praising him. Because that was bad enough. That was really all it took for me to conclude that many if not most people must now agree with me: that these very silly awards, which are stupid on numerous levels, have not only become an international embarrassment yet again. And more than that, having their most recent Peace Prize winner french kiss the ass of the world’s most dangerous despot was finally a bridge too far.
And then, after I’d already completed a draft of this essay, it happened: she actually gave him her medal. Put it in a frame and everything, along with a note of gratitude to Donald Trump. And he happily accepted it, grinning from ear to ear like dumber-than-most nine-year-olds holding a piece of cake, the pride seeping so thickly from his pores as to streak the bronzer slathered on his skin.
I, like most people, couldn’t care less about the science prizes. Keep giving the Dynamite Legacy Award to select scientists, some of whom have their graduate students and post-docs do most of their work for them. Whatever.
The Lit prize seems downright silly.
The Economics “Nobel” is an absolute farce.
And the Peace Prize, already stained by so many dubious winners, has become not only an international embarrassment, but a real live mechanism for supporting a would be dictator: a profoundly mentally ill and unstable man who is showing increasing belligerence and violence on the world stage, and who also happens to have the codes for the world’s largest nuclear arsenal.
Enough is enough. Just stop. The world does not need, perhaps cannot afford, anymore Nobel Peace Prizes. And if those in charge of the award need inspiration for putting an end to all this, let them recall their own past, specifically the year 1948.
That year, the Norwegian Nobel Committee handed out the Peace Prize to: Nobody! Instead, they sat on their thumbs, insisting that no one was worthy of their vaunted, shiny medal. No one in the entire world, harrumph!
Not even Mahatma Gandhi, in 1948.
What a shame. It turned out that 1948 was his last year of eligibility. How so? Well, you have to be alive to win a Nobel; there are no posthumous Nobels. And Gandhi was assassinated in 1949.
Oh well.
Maybe it’s time the for Norwegian Nobel Committee to reclaim the spirit of 1948 and stop handing out these awards once and for all. I’m actually a big fan of silliness; it makes the world a more livable place. But self-important silliness is insufferable and should exist only to be skewered and deflated, like the highfalutin foil in a Marx Brothers film.
Or maybe that’s the answer. The Nobel folks should just stick to comedy.
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Akim Reinhardt’s website is ThePublicProfessor.com
