100 Years of 100 Things: Nobel Peace Prize

Title: 100 Years of 100 Things: Nobel Peace Prize

Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good Friday morning, everyone. This year's Nobel Peace Prize winner was announced this morning. We're going to discuss the award now in the context of the big sweep of history. We're making this headline thing number 29 in our WNYC centennial series that we're doing on the show, 100 Years of a 100 Things. It's 100 years of the Nobel Peace Prize. The winner announced today is a Japanese group, if you haven't heard this yet, called Nihon Hidankyo, made up of people who survived the atomic bomb attacks at the end of World War II. The Nobel Committee cited the group "for its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons." As The New York Times describes them, Nihon Hidankyo has for decades represented hundreds of thousands of survivors of the US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. These survivors, known as the hibakusha, are living memorials to the horror of the attacks and have used their testimony to raise awareness of the human consequences of nuclear warfare. This is a classic Nobel Peace Prize winner. By my rough count, this is the 8th award since those bombings 79 years ago that have been for work to prevent more nuclear attacks.

A look at the winners of the two years prior to this one shows other common categories for the Nobel Peace Prize last year, Narges Mohammadi, for her fight against the oppression of women in Iran. Two years ago, it was the Center for Civil Liberties based in Ukraine, for promoting people's right to criticize power and document human rights abuses. Free speech and women's rights, human rights in general, two of the other things that Nobel Peace Prizes are awarded for. When Martin Luther King won in 1964, he drew attention to the growing gap between different kinds of human aspirations. He noted humankind's astonishing technological advances. He mentioned skyscrapers and spaceships, for example, and yet--

Martin Luther King: In spite of these spectacular strides in science and technology, and still unlimited ones to come, something basic is missing. That is a sort of poverty of the spirit, which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance. The richer we have become materially, the poorer we have become morally and spiritually. We have learned to fly the air like birds and swim the sea like fish, but we have not learned the simple art of living together as brothers.

Brian Lehrer: Martin Luther King accepting the Nobel Peace Prize 60 years ago this fall in 1964. The Nobel Peace Prize has also been controversial at times in the last 100 years, especially when it's been awarded to people believed to have committed war crimes themselves, even if they later helped make peace. Some years it wasn't awarded at all. Why was that? The very idea of the Nobel Peace Prize, in fact, any of the Nobel prizes, raises the question, why do a handful of people chosen by the government of Norway get to name the most globally deserving people for anything anyway? Isn't the founder of the prizes, Alfred Nobel, pretty tainted himself?

Did he succeed in, you might call it, prize-washing his legacy with these awards that appear to promote the highest human values? Let's talk about 100 years and really all 124 years of the Nobel Prizes, especially the Peace Prize. Our guest to help us with this is Gideon Rose, adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, former editor of Foreign Affairs magazine, which they publish, and author of the book, How Wars End. Gideon, always good of you to join us on the show. Welcome back to WNYC.

Gideon Rose: Hi, Brian. Happy to be here.

Brian Lehrer: Let's first ask, who was Alfred Nobel? The Encyclopedia Britannica entry on him begins this way. "Alfred Nobel was a Swedish chemist, engineer, and industrialist who invented dynamite and other more powerful explosives." Later it goes on to say, "In 1865, Nobel invented an improved detonator called a blasting cap. The invention of the blasting cap inaugurated the modern use of high explosives. In the 1870s and '80s, Nobel built a network of factories throughout Europe to manufacture dynamite, and he formed a web of corporations to produce and market his explosives." That from Britannica.

Gideon, this guy, whose name probably elicits the word Peace Prize in most people's minds today if you say Nobel, was, during his lifetime, like a one man military industrial complex. Are you familiar with his bio enough to know if he founded the Peace Prize out of some guilt or to somehow make up for what he himself unleashed on the world?

Gideon Rose: Yes, it's not at all uncommon for people who make it rich to want to improve their reputations and morally wash themselves by having prizes named after them. Carnegie and Rockefeller were not exactly early benefactors to humanity in their commercial practices but ultimately gave giant foundations with their wealth to legitimize it. Nobel made a lot of money and did so in industrial explosives and military explosives and then decided to fund these prizes as a gift back to humanity, and also perhaps to change the line of the entry in his obituary.

What you put your finger on with the Martin Luther King quote was absolutely central, which is that the prizes are about human accomplishment and achievement, but we've done more progress and achieved more in the sciences, the natural sciences, than we have, as it were, in the human sciences. Things like peace or literature really don't go well together with chemistry and physics and biology because there hasn't been the kind of cumulative progress in the non-hard sciences. Deciding who gets a prize for progress in a field that hasn't made much progress is or has or can't make progress, like literature, is in some ways quite always controversial.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. To just finish on Nobel and highlight one of the things you said, that not only to make him feel better, but how he would be remembered after his death, here's a passage from the History Channel's website, history.com. it says, "In 1888, Nobel's brother, Ludvig, had died in France from a heart attack. Thanks to poor reporting, at least one french newspaper believed that it was Alfred who had perished and had proceeded to write a scathing obituary that branded him a 'Merchant of death' who had grown rich by developing new ways to 'mutilate and kill.'"

History.com cites biographer Kenne Fant, who wrote that Nobel "became so obsessed with a posthumous reputation that he rewrote his last will, bequeathing most of his fortune to a cause upon which no future obituary writer would be able to cast dispersions." Maybe we give him the grace to praise his ability to change and grow and be introspective about his life, or maybe we look cynically on someone who got very rich as an entrepreneur of war who was mostly just concerned with his reputation once that mistaken obituary got published while he was still alive.

Gideon Rose: They can both be true.

Brian Lehrer: That's true. That's fair. The first Nobel Peace Prize was given in 1901. The first five years of the Prize saw it go all to Europeans involved in international relations, or in one case, healing wounded soldiers. The first woman recipient was Bertha von Suttner of Austria-Hungary, in 1905 "for her audacity to oppose the horrors of war." Then in 1906, it went to the president of the United States for the first time, Theodore Roosevelt. Do you happen to know why that was?

Gideon Rose: The Russo-Japanese War negotiations, helping to bring peace in the Pacific, and helping to improve the world. There's been a fundamental contradiction in the Prize from the very beginning because we don't actually understand or know what causes peace. There are almost two different traditions in thinking about these issues. One is that it's a matter of virtue and that the people who do war are bad, evil people, and so that essentially virtue can triumph over vice and that that would stop war.

Another take has a much darker view of the world and sees the world as nearly inherently fallen or dangerous place in which what you're basically getting is balancing and jockeying for power among relatively amoral states, and what keeps peace are Machiavellian maneuverings and deterrence and balance of power. This is what gives you the flip back and forth between the people who get prizes, who are bad people or who have done bad things but helped to use the tools of international relations to end conflicts, like Kissinger and Le Duc Tho or Rabin and Arafat, people like that, and people who are essentially secular saints who the Norwegians want to lionize for their virtue.

I think this Prize goes in that second category. It's really a kind of virtue signaling on the part of the Committee. "We don't like nuclear war. We think there shouldn't be no nuclear weapons, and we're going to promote and bolster these victims who essentially are using their victimhood to remind us all that these are very, very bad things."

Brian Lehrer: Yes, this year's Prize. Listeners, we invite your thoughts and your questions about the Nobel Peace Prize. 212-433-WNYC. In our 100 Years of 100 Things series: 100 Years of the Nobel Peace Prize, okay, really 124 years, as it was first given out in 1901. 212-433-9692. Have you, listeners, learned about anyone's important work because you heard the news about a peace prize one year? Has anyone that influenced how you see the world or even what you do in your life? Or, maybe you object to certain winners or people who've been left out? Or, do you care who wins the Nobel Peace Prize?

Should it matter who a small group of people named by the government of Norway think should be honored around the world? Does it whitewash or prize wash the memory of Alfred Nobel himself too much for you as the inventor of dynamite and a guy who got rich selling instruments of war? 212-433-WNYC, or on this year's winner announced this morning, the Japanese group called Nihon Hidankyo, people who survived the atomic bomb attacks at the end of World War II and have devoted their work to preventing any more nuclear attacks. Any of you belong to that group or know them?

212-433-WNYC. Call or text on 100 Years of 100 Things: 100 Years of the Nobel Peace Prize. Your questions, your thoughts? 212-433-WNYC. 212-433-9692, for Gideon Rose from the Council of Foreign Relations and author of the book How Wars End. Gideon, the Nobel Peace Prize was not awarded in 1914, '15, or '16 because of World War I. Then to the Red Cross in the year the war ended for its efforts to care for wounded soldiers from the war and prisoners of war, and the next year, 1919, to US President Woodrow Wilson for his role in the founding of the League of Nations.

Exactly 100 years ago, in 1924, as well as 1923, the Prize was again not awarded to anyone. Do you know this aspect of Nobel Peace Prize history, why the Nobel Committee has sometimes decided not to give it to anyone? There are always some people working for world peace even in the middle of a war.

Gideon Rose: Well, the deliberations are always secret, and that's to try and give it a cloak of authority so that you don't see the sausage being made. What exactly is going on, and who the runners-up are, and how they decide, they don't want to try and make that public because it would diminish the aura of the prize, which comes ex-cathedra in this way. Sometimes they just decide, "You know what? This is a really big award. It deserves to go towards an actual move towards peace. If we don't have something at that scale, we shouldn't give it," or if there are deep divisions inside and they can't decide on anything.

This gets back to the subjectivity of the Committee because in fields like science, where there is enough intersubjective agreement on what constitutes progress, the awards have tended to recognize, even if people disagree with this or that particular scientist and might favor another scientist who deserves it, there's a general agreement that all the people who've gotten the Nobel prizes in the hard sciences have done amazing intellectual and practical accomplishments that actually have advanced science and advanced human progress.

In the more subjective fields, again, of literature and peace, it's not clear what the criteria are for judging. It always ends up being infinitely more subjective and tends to reflect the tastes or the politics of the Committee members rather than any objective measure of progress.

Brian Lehrer: Continuing up the timeline a bit, the award continued to go exclusively to Europeans and Americans and overwhelmingly white European and American men, that gradually has changed over time, until 1936 when the winner was Carlos Saavedra Lamas of Argentina for mediating peace between Paraguay and Bolivia in a conflict those countries had had. It took until 1936 for someone outside Europe or the United States to win a Nobel Peace Prize. In 1938, it went to the League of Nations Refugee Agency. Then again in 1939, '40, '41, '42, and '43, once again, no Nobel Peace Prize because of World War II.

They, again, did not award it in 1948. This is a notable one. The Peace Prize only goes to people who are currently living, and they honored Mahatma Gandhi, who had just been assassinated, by awarding it to no living person that year. The fact that Gandhi, Gideon, had not been given the Prize during his lifetime, points to one of the enduring controversies. People very deserving who did not get a Nobel Peace Prize. This can be merely a parlor game like which cool song didn't get a Grammy nomination, or it can point to some important blind spots. Any notable omissions on your radar about the Nobel Peace Prize?

Gideon Rose: It's actually a great question. It's a little bit like the Hall of Fame discussions in baseball. Which of your favorite players deserves to be in the Hall of Fame? There are always big fights about this. Then some people get nominated and never win, and some win, and you go, "Why did that person get in?" The same thing is true for the death criteria because there are a lot of scientists and a lot of authors who would have deserved to be in there. It all comes down, again, to the criteria of judging. The facade of 124 years of constant awarding of the Prize, even with a few non-giving years, overlooks the fact that in this field, we don't have clear criteria for choice.

It tends to go back and forth between people who have a darker view of the world, who make peace or reduce conflict, but use the tools of realism and tough-minded thinking and international jockeying to achieve that, versus people who are trying, in effect, to transcend politics overall. If I had to give a Prize this year, I would might have given it to the Olympics, again, like they did it in 1988. You've talked about how they've given it to many, many anti-nuclear causes over the years. The Olympics represent a way of competing internationally that doesn't involve war. This year's was very sustainable. You could imagine that as being a degrowth award as well.

The problem with the current Prize is, however victimized this group was, the actual bombings helped end World War II and helped end the depredations that the Japanese imperial army was carrying out all across Asia during the War. You could make a good case that it's actually nuclear weapons that have helped keep the peace since World War II more than anything else. You could actually have given this year's prize legitimately, if you thought differently, to the nuclear weapons themselves rather than the victims of them, and had at least as good a case of saying this is what causes peace.

Brian Lehrer: Wow. In the end of World War II context, I know there are some people who've criticized the Nobel Committee historically for not giving it to Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, who we could say, "Well, what did they do?" They won the war, but it ended the Nazi and fascist era.

Gideon Rose: Exactly. It comes down to, what do you think will cause or bring peace in the world? This goes back, again, to what Martin Luther King said in his speech, which is we've made fantastic progress in science, in economics, in control of the natural world. I don't think he's correct that we've gone backwards in morals because the world is objectively less violent now than it used to be. There's more human rights. There's more political representation and democracy. It's just it hasn't advanced nearly as far as material and economic and technological progress.

Then the question becomes, what do you think are the drivers of peace, the drivers of a less violent world and society? The problem is we don't actually have good hard theories or any consensus on those things, which is why the Prizes are always somewhat random and always disputed.

Brian Lehrer: We're going to play another Martin Luther King clip from his 1964 Nobel Prize acceptance speech in a minute that raises another issue, but let's take a phone call or two first. Jeffrey in Somerset, New Jersey, you're on WNYC. Hi, Jeffrey.

Jeffrey: Yes, thank you, Brian. I was a little surprised that you didn't mention the first woman winner of the Nobel Prize in 1905.

Brian Lehrer: Wait, I did mention her. I specifically mentioned her. Let me go back and look it up again.

Jeffrey: Did you mention her influence on Nobel-

Brian Lehrer: Go ahead.

Jeffrey: -in terms of, they were friends since the 1870s, and she was actually president of one of the Vienna International Peace Bureaus. She wrote a book called Lay Down Your Arms. She was very influential on Nobel. You were talking about the motivations that Nobel had to do what he did. She was one of the big influencers of him.

Brian Lehrer: Bertha von Suttner-

Gideon Rose: Bertha von Suttner.

Brian Lehrer: -the name, again, of Austria-Hungary in 1905 with the Committee cited officially was "for her audacity to oppose the horrors of war." Jeffrey, thank you for putting some extra meat on those bones. Anything else about von Suttner from you, Gideon?

Gideon Rose: It's the perfect example of what I was talking about. Von Suttner was a leading figure in the peace movement, and she was involved in-- There was a very strong peace movement before World War I, and there has continued to be one, but the question of whether we have gotten great power peace such as we have from the peace movement or from developments in war and in power politics, is an interesting question.

There are those who would argue that, as you talked about Roosevelt and Churchill, that it's the gradual accumulation of power, real old-fashioned, hard military power by liberal democracies which have managed progressively to defeat autocratic regimes and maintain some peace that enables the spread of commerce, that enables the spread of democracy. That is what has caused peace as opposed to people opposed to the entire war complex, as it were.

This is something that you can make a case for peace activism, you can make a case for the statesmen and leaders who have used the tools of rail politics to achieve stability. The fact is, we just don't have criteria for adjudicating those disputes intellectually, which makes the Prizes controversial.

Brian Lehrer: We'll continue in a minute with Gideon Rose as we talk about 100 years of the Nobel Peace Prize on the morning on which the 2024 Peace Prize was announced. We'll play that other Martin Luther King clip right after the break. We have an Obama clip coming up from his acceptance speech in 2009, which raises another set of issues. We'll take more of your calls and texts. I see you, by the way, Ethan, calling from Oslo, Norway. Give us a couple of minutes. We will get to you. Brian Lehrer on WNYC.

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. We're talking about the Nobel Peace Prize awarded this morning, and in the context of our WNYC centennial series, 100 Years of 100 Things. It's 100 years of the Nobel Peace Prize today with Gideon Rose, adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, former editor of Foreign Affairs magazine, and author of the book How Wars End. I was going to play that other Martin Luther King clip next from his 1964 Nobel speech, but Ethan is calling us from the home of the Nobel Prizes Norway, from Oslo, Norway, and probably costs a lot of money to stay on hold from Oslo to New York. Let me go right to Ethan. Ethan, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Ethan: Wow. Thank you for taking my call. I listen all the time. Your program means the world to hear. Makes me want to live there again. Your callers, especially hearing the community, it's awesome. I guess my point, if I can make two points, the first is just, every year when this is coming out, I'm holding my breath because I feel like in my lifetime, you just keep seeing the Nobel Peace Prize going to somebody who then goes on to commit war crimes. The current prime minister of Ethiopia received the prize in 2019.

I think it's pretty fair to say that what went down, what he sent Ethiopian troops to do in South Sudan, pretty strong evidence that he directed regular soldiers, to rape and murder people in refugee camps. I don't think that's that controversial to say. Obama, of course, expanded the drone war in seven countries. Aung San Suu Kyi, pretty gnarly stuff. I feel like I get into this a lot in my life, living in Norway with people here, where there's this weird thing where the Prize goes out, terrible things happens. It's almost like you can look to who they give it to to find where terrible things are going to happen next.

Then there's this weird thing in the United States where we assume that Norway deserves to be giving out this Prize. his is an oil state. When you actually get past the very gentle and kind veneer, and it is a social democracy for those who live here, but this is a country that is doing insane things with the oil state, pushing oil projects where they should not possibly be happening. North of Scotland, this project just got killed by the government in the UK. No joke, terrible stuff. We're not paying enough attention to where this is coming from in the first place.

Oslo is. for those who don't-- people come here for a week, some of your listeners will be thinking, "Oh, I visited there. It was great." It's like Bernie Sanders on steroids. When you get out of the city and you see how deeply segregated this place is, there's a lot of ways in which this should just not be the country. If Nobel sent it out of Sweden, because Sweden was at the time an imperial power, I think it's time to revisit where the Prize is [crosstalk].

Brian Lehrer: Besides your critique of Norway, Ethan, how do you process for yourself the good and the bad of some of the people who you identified, who have done, arguably, very bad things, but also maybe done very good things that earned them the prize?

Ethan: I feel like you need an undo button. I think there should be a threat within the Prize that if you go on, if you take this and use it to bolster your regime's plans that are, like in the case of Ethiopia, what went down, it seems the timing is just too crazy. It's like, you gave this guy-- Ethiopia was moving in a very democratic direction. Things were really improving from where they had been. I feel like you give the Prize and this guy maybe just went crazy with power, or maybe just is being-- there's no safety valves in place, but [crosstalk].

Brian Lehrer: Maybe there should be a rescission process where you could rescind a prize if somebody goes on to do really objectionable things that are against the spirit of the Nobel Prize, is what you're saying. Ethan, I'm going to leave it there. Get some other people on. Thank you very much. Call us again, okay?

Ethan: Awesome. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: What are you thinking, Gideon, listening to Ethan in Oslo?

Gideon Rose: I think that it's actually a really interesting question, because are you giving the prize for a specific act, which therefore would continue to be legitimate even if someone committed another act down the road that was not good, or are you giving it for a general approbation of the character of the people involved, in which case, if they committed a bad act after they committed a good one or a good one after a bad one, it should balance out and not be legit? I go back and forth on that because I can understand the argument if someone does something.

Kim Dae-jung got the award. He was a great South Korean dissident, came into power, ended up being a corrupt guy, and got cashiered for corruption. That happens a lot. I don't think that negates his activism. The question about Obama, it's not-- My problem with the Obama award was not that he went on to do drone strikes later. It's that it was given basically as, "You're not George Bush, and we like in America that is not a George Bush America." They gave it to him so early, before he'd done anything. It was like an award betting on the come. It was on the what we hoped he would do rather than what he actually did.

Brian Lehrer: In his acceptance speech, he acknowledged that. I'm going to play a clip. He acknowledged that his body of work did not rise to the level of previous winners. This was just, as you say, the first year of his presidency. He cited Doctor King, Nelson Mandela, George Marshall, and Albert Schweitzer, greats from the past. Then he continued with his pretty tough acknowledgment of the position he was in as president at the moment.

Barak Obama: Perhaps the most profound issue surrounding my receipt of this Prize is the fact that I am the commander-in-chief of a military, of a nation in the midst of two wars. One of these wars is winding down. The other is a conflict that America did not seek, one in which we are joined by 42 other countries, including Norway, in an effort to defend ourselves and all nations from further attacks.

Still, we are at war. I'm responsible for the deployment of thousands of young Americans to battle in a distant land. Some will kill and some will be killed. I come here with an acute sense of the costs of armed conflict, filled with difficult questions about the relationship between war and peace and our effort to replace one with the other.

Brian Lehrer: Obama in his 2009 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech. Gideon, tough stuff, Obama forcing the conversation in a Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech about a just war as opposed to simply being anti-war.

Gideon Rose: Oh, it was a great speech. He actually also defended the notion that many Europeans would not particularly agree with, that American power and deployments had created the infrastructure for the world that the peaceful world that they were all living in. I thought that was a wonderful speech at the time. The question of the timing of it, it's interesting. In the 1990s, the people who were behind the Ireland peace process and the people who were behind the Oslo Accords, both won prizes.

The Irish peace process has continued, and the Oslo Accords and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process did not do so well. We've had continuing fighting since. I don't think it was wrong to give either of those prizes because, yes, it would be nice if once in a while you could give something to a permanent, wonderful solution to a problem. First of all, you're always going to be-- you never know what's going to happen next. The idea that you should revoke the Prize, I don't know, because, again, you were giving it to people who did something that made the world better and more peaceful.

If you actually awarded it correctly, then the fact they did something later may not take-- as long as you-- In effect, instead of giving it to a person, you could give it to an act, I guess. We give the Prize, or they give the Prize, to a person as representative of something. That representation of what the Prize stood for continues even if the person themselves falls short later on of the human perfection we would like to see.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, and that's part of the debate. You mentioned the Prize being given to Obama partly just for not being George W. Bush, who started the Iraq war. There's a critique on the right that the Prize, in recent decades, has taken on a left political ideology or an anti-Americanism. They cite that Prize to Obama. Those critics ask, why did the Soviet leader, Gorbachev, get it at the end of the Cold War in 1990 but not Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher for keeping the pressure on to bring down that totalitarian empire? Have you thought about this, or do you give that critique any credence?

Gideon Rose: Yes. I think that's pretty obvious in the sense that it represents a certain European view of the world and a certain European somewhat lefty view of the world at that. Even though there are even more lefty Europeans who would like the Prize to be even more divorced from mainstream international politics and talk about transformation of the entire world in various different ways, there's no question that it essentially is a pat on the back for people who are certain center left European feels are making the world a better place.

That's going to be true for all sorts of things. The literature prize is even more like that. It's the country that we want to give a prize to, or the author or the literary movement that we want to give a prize to, without necessarily any actual justification. Rather than think of this as an authoritative prize, which officially enshrines absolute human achievement, we should think of it as one group of people choosing something and trying to use their powers to highlight stuff, like the Pulitzer's or any other prize, rather than the Olympics, let's say, where you have an actual record of physical accomplishment that can be measured.

Brian Lehrer: You mentioned the literature prize. That's not explicitly for doing humanitarian or peace-building works, but some of the people who've won that, have been very controversial for other things they've done. One prominent example pretty recently, the Austrian writer, Peter Handke, won the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature. He's still alive. Handke became politically notorious starting in the 1990s for his defense of Serbia's conduct in the Balkan wars, what the International Court of Justice has deemed as a genocide of Bosnian Muslims.

In response to the award, Pan America said it was "dumbfounded by the selection of a writer who has used his public voice to undercut historical truth and offer public succor to perpetrators of genocide." Then we had The New York Times columnist Bret Stephens writing that year in 2019, Handke also resembles other writers, Nobel laureates in particular, in his awful political judgment. Bret Stephens cited the British playwright Harold Pinter, who won a Nobel in 2005. Stephen says he was only slightly less zealous than Handke in his defense of Milosevic, the Serbian dictator. Cites Gunter Grass. 1999 winner, confessed late in life that he had been a member of the Waffen-SS.

Even Sartre, who won the Literature Prize in 1964, same year as Martin Luther King won the Peace Prize, visited the Soviet Union in 1954 and praised it for its "complete freedom of criticism." I guess my question with all of that is, is there less of a test for non-Peace Prize winners, or are there serious moral blind spots on the Nobel Committees that just span all the categories equally?

Gideon Rose: Again, you say all the categories. There are hard science prizes which go towards generally recognized acknowledgments that improve human knowledge and progress are in the ability to understand and control the natural, physical world. Those are relatively uncontroversial except in their disciplines. While individual biologists or chemists or others might have views on who should get it and who didn't, and even economists feel the same way-- I knew a very famous economist who had an office down the hall from me for many years, who was rumored to be a potential contender for the Prize, given his work on trade.

Every year, he would get very, very angry and tense in the years in the time leading up to it, and then when somebody else would get it, because he never got it, would go around furiously. There are controversies in the other prizes, but those are essentially not that controversial to the world at large because these all seem like legitimate recipients. When it comes to peace, when it comes to literature, these are things which everybody has an opinion, and so we end up talking about it and fighting about it. I think the answer is, we should take those prizes a lot less seriously than we do the science prizes.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take one more caller from somebody who wants to remember a past Nobel Peace Prize winner who maybe is not as well-known as some of the other people we've been talking about. Jill in Glen Ridge, you're on WNYC. Hi, Jill.

Jill: Hi. I wanted to mention Jane Addams, who, I believe, won the Prize for her opposition to World War I. Am I correct?

Brian Lehrer: Familiar with that, Gideon? I'm not sure who that refers to.

Gideon Rose: Jane Addams founded Hull-House and was a wonderful reformer. Let me actually just check. Jane Addams was a great benefactor of humanity. She got the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931 for her dedication to social reform, women's rights, and pacifism. It's interesting because-- Addams' pacifism,

Brian Lehrer: Was she the first American woman?

Gideon Rose: That's an interesting question. She probably was. She got it for her peace activism because she co-founded the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom in 1919, and she was a strong peace advocate, particularly during and after World War I. Here's a good example. Jane Addams is a wonderful social reformer whose Hull-House and progressivism prefigured the New Deal.

Her social reforms, her devotion to labor rights, child welfare, women's suffrage, things like that, strikes-- Yes, she was indeed the first American woman to receive the prize. She shared it with Nicholas Murray Butler in that year. To me, Jane Addams' domestic social reforms were far more significant than lasting than her international peace advocacy.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting.

Gideon Rose: I'm glad she got the Prize, but again, it's like whether she got it for her peace stuff when she really should have gotten it for prefiguring the New Deal because she was a great progressive activist who helped create the modern welfare state that we know today.

Brian Lehrer: Again, confirming the fact, yes, she was the first American recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1931, 30 years after the Prize began to be awarded, she was only the second woman from anywhere to have won. That ratio has changed dramatically in recent years, but boy, was it overwhelmingly male at the beginning. Let me play that Martin Luther King clip that I mentioned before. Again, 1964, 60 years ago this year, Doctor King won the Prize. As we mentioned, the Committee cited his nonviolent struggle for civil rights in the United States. Here's another brief excerpt from Dr. King's Nobel Prize acceptance speech, in which he highlights not only his just cause but his means of achieving it. [00:40:21]

Martin Luther King: Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is, I am convinced, both impractical and immoral. I am not unmindful of the fact that violence often brings about momentary results. Nations have frequently won their independence in battle, but in spite of temporary victories, violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problems. It merely creates new and more complicated ones.

Violence is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding. It seeks to annihilate rather than convert. Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love. It destroys community and makes brotherhood impossible. It leaves society in monologue rather than dialogue. Violence ends up defeating itself. It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers.

Brian Lehrer: 1964, Dr. King. Gideon, the nonviolence is the peace part. Would you say the idea of a Peace Prize is also a human rights and social justice prize the way it's been administered? Like last year's winner, Narges Mohammadi, jailed, and I believe still jailed, activists for women's rights in Iran.

Gideon Rose: This is the question because there's peace, there's democracy, there's human rights, and these are all basic trends in human development. There's growth and prosperity, there's reduction in inequality. These are all developments in human history that lead us to better lives, but there are different spheres. The question of how the developments in each sphere are related is an interesting one.

King was a saint, obviously, but it took not just King, it also took politicians like LBJ to bring civil rights. It took Gandhi, but it also took Nehru to bring independence and a stable, democratic India. The Prize has always had this schizophrenic aspect in which it wants a better world and it wants to promote people who are moving the world in that direction. The unfortunate fact is, we just don't know how to make the world better well enough to be able to give prizes in this regard that are uncontroversial.

Brian Lehrer: One question about this year's award before you go. I'm sure that anti-nuclear group from Japan, Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors, is extremely worthy, but did the Nobel Committee dock the war raging in the Middle East? Could they have given it to groups? I believe one of the people from the winning group cited Gaza in remarks today, from what I've read. Could they have given the award to groups, no matter how marginal, who might be working for peace between Israelis and Palestinians?

Gideon Rose: There are several wars going on right now, not just in Gaza. There's a terrible war of even larger scale going on in Ukraine, where Russia is trying to basically conquer another country in an act of imperial aggression that's caused more than 1 million casualties of its own in Ukraine. There's a terrible conflict going on in Sudan. Yes, it seems to me-- The people who are threatening nuclear use now are not the people who were the victims of it, it's the people who are-- other it's the Russians. It's the Russians who forced Ukraine to give up their nuclear weapons and did so under the promise that Ukraine wouldn't be hurt.

Ironically, if I'm a Ukrainian and I hear this, I think to myself, "You know what? If I hadn't given up my nuclear weapons, then maybe I wouldn't be attacked and fighting for my life as a country right now." I think there were other Prize recipients who could have been the recipients this year, who would have highlighted-- I personally would have given it to people trying to do something about what's going on in Sudan because it's the biggest conflict that isn't getting any attention. Again, it comes down to what you think are the priorities and what you think deserves to be highlighted as a way out of them.

Brian Lehrer: Leaving us with a lot to think about as we close, that's 100 Years of 100 Things for today. Thing number 29, 100 years of the Nobel Peace Prize. On Monday, Thing number 30, on Columbus Day/Indigenous Peoples Day, we'll discuss 100 years of fighting for Indigenous people's stories to be recognized in the United States. For today, we thank Gideon Rose, adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, former editor of Foreign Affairs magazine, and author of the book How Wars End. Gideon, thanks so much.

Gideon Rose: Thank you.

 

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