Alfred Nobel’s Prize
My wife and I share Swedish ancestry, so we knew from the time we were young that the Nobel Peace Prize is named after a famous 19th century Swedish inventor. While people might assume that we would be proud of that fact, the truth is more complicated.
Alfred Nobel was a highly successful businessman, but what he invented and sold was dynamite. Yes, he sold his explosive to mining companies, but he also knew the military uses of dynamite. It’s fair to say that his invention changed the nature of war for the worse.
It was therefore a surprise to many when his will was opened after his death and it was discovered that he’d left money for prizes not just in the sciences, such as chemistry and physics, but also for a prize in peacemaking.
The Nobel Peace Prize has been in the news recently because President Trump has been openly campaigning to receive it. Although I am not an expert on the history of the prize, I find Trump’s self-promotion, claiming that he deserves the prize, to be both strange and embarrassing.
Firstly, while Trump likes to present himself as the world’s greatest peacemaker, he has already in his second term attacked Yemen and Iran and now threatens to attack Venezuela. Also, despite all his highly-publicized efforts, children in Gaza continue to be killed by Netanyahu’s air strikes. And then there were Trump’s threats to take over Greenland and even Canada, which seem more like Putin than Martin Luther King, Jr. or Gandhi. Currently, Trump is considering resuming nuclear testing. In other words, Mr. President, the peace dove hasn’t landed on your shoulder. Your “optics” are just not good.
Secondly, President Trump has misunderstood the kind of person who the Nobel committee favors for this award. Look over the list of previous winners and you’ll see that few winners are household names. The committee honors the work of the little-known and courageous worker for peace, often people who have promoted peace in the face of dictators. Supporters of Trump’s campaign will cite Barack Obama receiving the prize in 2009 for his support of “Arab Spring,” but it’s well-known that Obama was embarrassed by the honor.
The Nobel Peace Prize is not a popularity contest. The closest parallel to the Peace Prize is the designation of someone as a saint. As the axiom goes, no one who considered herself or himself a saint ever became one. The same is true of the peace prize. The one common denominator of peace prize recipients is that they are humbled by the award. They feel undeserving, not deserving.
I wish President Trump had taken a course in philosophy in college because if he had, he might have come across this insight from Aristotle. “Dignity does not consist in possessing honors, but in deserving them.”