It seems that the Nobel Prize is no longer has the prestige it once did.
Sure, the prizes in physics, chemistry and medicine still have meaning, I suppose.
But the Peace Prize (awarded by a separate committee, in Norway) just can´t be taken seriously anymore. Obama? Gore? El Baradei? Carter? Peres? Arafat? Really, Arafat?
And the prize in literature seems to be awarded by going to Wikipedia and clicking “Random page” until something vaguely literaturish appears. Sure, they picked an unusually non-obscure (by their standards) Peruvian novelist this year, but it´s a rare exception.
If I were the Nobel Prize committee, I would trash the last two above, and institute the following prizes:
[ul]
[li]Engineering: a prize for the best invention. [/li][li]Culture: A general culture prize, that could be awarded to filmmakers, artists, writers, or anybody else creating works of art.[/li][li]Information technology: a prize awarded to pioneers of the virtual world which is the new frontier.[/li][/ul]
Could the Nobel Prize be reformed? Does a prize like that really do any good anymore? Did it ever?
What’s wrong with Carter? And why isn’t Kissinger head of that list?
Admittedly the Peace prize has too often gone to warmongers who get it when they get too old and tired to keep fighting anymore. I can’t decide whether this is a deliberate ploy by the Committee to encourage others or whether they’re just grateful that the fighting has stopped but this has always seemed perverse to me. And the Obama nomination can only be seen as a giant “fuck you” to George W Bush, which is even more perverse. I really wonder what their actual criteria are.
Is Miss Universe really the most beautiful and talented lass in all the, er, universe?
The first problem with the OP’s suggestion is that the list of prizes was established by Nobel himself, in his will, and the endowment that originally financed them came from Nobel’s estate. I doubt the prize committee can legally just scrap one of the six original awards entirely if they don’t happen to like it. They can, however, elect not to give an award in a given category in a certain year, and have done so in the past. I wouldn’t mind seeing the Peace Prize simply not awarded from time to time, with maybe a statement from the committee that they couldn’t find anyone that year who wasn’t a war-mongering asshole.
OTOH, while the Nobel Peace Prize may be controversial, it is by no means irrelevant, if for no other reason than it seems to generate quite a lot of discussion as to who else might be worthy of such a prize. OK, Obama was definitely a stretch, but is this year’s winner, Liu Xiaobo, wholly undeserving of such an award?
Likewise, what is wrong with including Al Gore? I remind the OP that the award was made jointly to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Gore, and I’m pretty sure everyone understands that the real science was done by the IPCC and Gore was included mainly for his PR efforts on the IPCC’s behalf.
To the Peace Prize committee I say: shine on, you crazy diamonds.
There’s no objective criteria on whether or not the prize is relevant (or ever was). People’s opinions are mostly based on what they think of the past winners. If you think they’re good choices, you probably think the prize is relevant; if not, you probably don’t.
The Nobel Prize has never been chosen that carefully or wisely. Look carefully through the list of the winners in each of the categories since the beginning and see how haphazard the selections seem. I’m not sure that it’s possible to choose the winners any better than they are now. Worrying about this is like worrying about why the Oscars don’t consistently go to the best films and people.
You tell TIME to stop picking stupid shit like “Us” for Person of the Year, and I’ll tell the Nobel Committee to stop awarding Peace Prizes for not being George Bush and pretending not to bomb Cambodia.
Maybe the Peace Prize should be posthumously awarded to the team behind the Manhattan Project.
I mean, the main reason we haven’t had a world war to is the assuredness of all major cities getting blown to fine, radioactive dust.
Nuclear submarines should have one too. As should Nato. And perhaps the United States. Any way you look at it, American hegemony is a big reason there have been so few wars between major players since WWII.
First of all, as has been said, the areas covered by the prize were set down by Alfred Nobel himself, so can’t be changed without a lot of trouble.
Second, the only prize that really causes a lot of controversy regularly is the Peace Prize. And that can’t be helped – it’s the nature of the thing.
With pretty few exceptions, the science prizes seem fairly well deserved.
The Literature Prize often seems to be given to obscure writers, but I think that’s only because it is often given to authors who do not write in English. Readers in other languages may not think they are so obscure.
Generally the Nobel prize for other fields is for work decades earlier in order to give time to determine what is overly hyped crap and what actually is an award worthy advancement. Doing something similar with the Peace prize would restore some of it’s shine in my eyes at least. Not decades previously of course, but perhaps at least a few years delay.
Although I do think the Nobel Prize is relevant, sometimes. If nothing else, it draws attention. I may not agree with the winner, but because of the Nobel their work does get more attention. It also can have some effect on what they work for. For example, if it weren’t for the Nobel Peace prize I honestly would have no idea who Liu Xiaobo is. Given China’s reaction, the award has also put the regime in an uncomfortable position. It won’t magically make everything better of course, but it does make people pause and think about human rights in China. How much more relevance can you expect from an award?
I’m just guessing, but it might be because global warming isn’t about peace, except in the most tenuous way using a sort of logic that would make damned near anything about peace.
I don’t even know where to start with all the mistakes here. First off, the Manhattan Project developed bombs. Those bombs killed a shit ton of people. You can make a decent case the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved lives, but the weapons killed something like 100,000 people directly and hurt, displaced, or caused eventual cancers in far more people than that. There’s no definition of “peace” that fits there. Second, you might want to recount the number of World Wars, because it looks like you meant to write “we haven’t have a World War Two.” You may be in for a shock. Third, there have been a great many wars since the atomic bombings. None have been dubbed a world war, but some were quite large. Fourth, it’s debatable that MAD worked. I think I can quit there.
Let me take a guess: you haven’t read the criteria for the Nobel Peace Prize. It is for people. It has, in some cases, been given to an organizations. Not STUFF. “Nuclear submarines?” Nevermind that they’re an instrument of war… actually, strike that. They’re an instrument of war. Even if you could give Nobel Prizes to stuff, giving them to WEAPONS kind of defeats the fucking point.
Nobel’s will says the prize is for “the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”
And your nominations are the Manhattan Project, which ended about 65 years ago anyway, and nuclear submarines. You think this is going to make the prize more relevant?
If you’re going for the Nobel prize in jamming qualifiers into a sentence, you’re off to a good start. (“Big reason,” “few wars,” “major players.”) I think the U.S. has invaded enough countries and killed enough people that - even if it were eligible for the prize, which it isn’t - it’s probably out of the running for now.
The Peace Prize is for the person who “…shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses”
Since effective efforts to address climate change pretty clearly need to rely on international agreements, teaties and “fraternity between nations”, and Gore was given the prize specifically for his work with the international IPCC, which tries to co-ordinate a global response to climate change, I think he qualifies.
Yes, the prizes in the various social and physical sciences are for work that has proven its worth. The Peace Prize, on the other hand, is meant to encourage an ongoing effort. Personally, I think it’s a good idea.
Except for the whole, you know, resource thing. Let’s see, how many wars have been fought over land, water, oil, etc.?
Oh, and Obama got it for his work on nuclear disarmament, which he’s been doing since 2005. Probably also a poke at Bush, but he’s done a lot to earn it both as Senator and President.
I’ve heard this claim many times before and it just isn’t supportable by logic or evidence. In no way does it reflect Alfred Nobel’s wishes, and it’s quite inconsistent with the actual history of the Prize, which in at least half the cases was clearly given - just read the Prize Committee’s statements - to people for things they had already accomplished.
I’m all for awarded prizes to people for achieving peace, but there’s no way you can do something like this and not have a lot of awards that turn out to be ridiculous in hindsight. You can’t quantify contribution to peace. So hey, hand out ten Prizes a year, but there’s no point worrying about the fact some will seem absurd. Obama’s was obviously absurd the day they announced it, and I like Barack Obama.
It would take two, maybe three years for this one to seem as ridiculous as any other prize. If they’d been handing it out for the last ten years, we’d be here laughing about how they gave the Nobel Prize in IT to the guy who invented Myspace or the CEO of Circuit City.
By the exact same logic NATO, the Warsaw pact (when it existed), NAFTA, the Coalition of the willing, or even Justin Bieber’s world tour all deserve a Nobel Peace prize just because they involved multiple nations coming together for a common goal.
Has there once been a prominent advocate of peace who said “I was gonna kick back and say fuck it, but the I thought maybe I could get a Nobel prize…”?
By the same logic, Madalyn Murray O’Hair should have gotten a Nobel Peace prize because religions have caused a lot of wars.
Like I originally said: global warming isn’t about peace, except in the most tenuous way using a sort of logic that would make damned near anything about peace.
By the way, I’m kinda curious, Terry Pratchett fan or comic book animal fan?
Pratchett. And saying Obama’s award is ridiculous just shows that you have no idea how much he’s done to reduce the nuclear weapons the US and Russia have.
Where did I say Obama’s award is ridiculous? I said Gore’s was.
For Obama, I think the award was premature rather than ridiculous. If he gets the new START treaty, if he follows Bush’s withdraw plan for Iraq, if he comes up with a decent withdraw plan for Afghanistan, if he closes gitmo, if he is able to stop nuclear proliferation to ‘rouge’ nations, and if he has significant influence among world leaders to encourage peace then I think he deserves his award.
Although I do find it astounding that the Nobel prize committee was able to determine he will do these things just a few days after he took office. It’s two years into his term and I’m still not sure he’ll be able to do more than one, maybe two, of them.