A moral dilemma. You’re a doctor whose entire career has been dedicated to seeking a cure for lung cancer. Thousands of people owe you their lives, although many thousands more, unable to overcome their addiction to tobacco, have slipped through your fingers. Then you receive news that you are to be honoured with an award which, as well as recognising your dedication, comes with a sizeable cash prize that could boost your research work.
The only drawback is that the award is called the Philip Morris Prize for Medicine and the investment fund from which its prize money is drawn was set up with profits from the tobacco industry. Could you, in all conscience, accept the award?
It could be argued that a similar moral dilemma confronts those who are awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, founded on the profits of an arms manufacturer whose products made possible the slaughter of humans on an industrial scale. But of the 104 individuals and 26 organisations who have received the call from Oslo since 1901, only one has declined the honour.
Last Friday, president Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia was named the latest peace laureate for his efforts to end the 50-year-old civil war that has killed 250,000 Colombians. There is, of course, no doubting the sincerity of Mr Santos and his decision to dedicate the prize of $925,000 (Dh3.4 million) to victims of the conflict. Yet we live in an age of historical revisionism, in which past norms are being increasingly examined under the microscope of hindsight and found wanting. Applying such scrutiny to the Nobel legacy, might it not be time to ask whether it remains acceptable to accept a Nobel Peace Prize?
Today, looking back in anger is all the rage. In the 21st century, leaders of nations express contrition for acts carried out by their forebears long before they were born. In 2006, 200 years after Britain abolished slavery, British prime minister Tony Blair expressed “deep sorrow” for his country’s role in the slave trade.
In South Africa last year, the Rhodes Must Fall movement celebrated the removal of a statue of the British colonialist Cecil Rhodes from the University of Cape Town, built in 1928 on land bequeathed for the purpose by Rhodes. The statue, said protesters, celebrated a man “who exploited black labour and stole land from indigenous people”. And, to bring the tobacco analogy full-circle, when Harvard University announced in 1990 that it was selling off its investments in tobacco companies, many were horrified to discover that the home of America’s most prestigious medical school had been profiting for years from an industry whose products were killing up to half a million Americans a year.
The decision, said Harvard president Derek Bok, had been motivated “by a desire not to be associated … with companies engaged in significant sales of products that create a substantial and unjustified risk of harm to other human beings”. So why does it remain justifiable to accept a peace prize tainted with the blood of countless millions?
No one is entirely sure why the Swedish chemist Alfred Bernhard Nobel revisited his will in November 1895, a year before his death, but almost certainly it had something to do with a premature obituary published in error.
In 1888, Nobel’s brother Ludvig died in Cannes. Several newspapers, confusing the two brothers, published an obituary of Alfred under the headline “The Merchant of Death is dead”. The wealthy Nobel, the article continued, “became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before”.
He most certainly did. Nobel invented several explosives, including dynamite, and founded dozens of armaments factories with the sole purpose of mechanising the taking of human life. At the time of his actual death, at the age of 63 in December 1896, he bequeathed a catalogue of 355 patents that reads like the charge sheet in a war crimes trial.
Most were concerned with improving the lethality of explosives and the methods for their delivery on the battlefield, and the list embraces numerous firearms, bullets, “explosive projectiles”, torpedoes and “war rockets”. With the foundations for the terrible, mechanised carnage of the First World War already being laid in Europe, one patent in particular stands out. Patent number 6021, filed in 1890, was concerned with “ways to prevent overheating of the bore of machine-guns”. Upon Nobel’s death, his family and others were shocked to discover that more than 90 per cent of the Swedish-born chemist’s considerable fortune was to be invested to create a fund, “the interest on which shall be annually distributed in the form of prizes to those who … shall have conferred the greatest benefit to mankind”.
In addition to prizes for the most important developments in physics, chemistry, medicine and literature, the fifth would go to “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”.
Perhaps it was the premature obituary that stung Nobel into action. He was a Christian, but it seems unlikely he would have been concerned with his place in the hereafter. As a Lutheran, he would have subscribed to the notion that there is nothing that human beings need or can do to secure their salvation other than believe in Jesus Christ. That leaves the less palatable possibility that to continue indulging the conceit of the Nobel Peace Prize today is merely to collude with the more earthly vanity that Nobel should be remembered for good works rather than bad.
Historians have credited Nobel’s late-life flirtation with peace to his friendship with Austrian Bertha von Suttner, a leading light in the European peace movement and author of the 1889 anti-war novel Lay Down Your Arms. But although Nobel funded peace societies on her behalf their correspondence shows he remained sceptical. “Perhaps my factories will put an end to war even sooner than your congresses,” he told her in 1892. “On the day when two army corps will be able to annihilate each other in a second, all civilised nations will recoil with horror and withdraw their troops.”
Both would be proved wrong. In 1905 von Suttner would become the fifth winner of the prize. Fortunately, perhaps, she died on June 21, 1914, a week before the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand tipped Europe into a war that undid all her work but did wonders for the profits of companies founded by Nobel. Later, the era of mutually assured destruction would not, contrary to Nobel’s prediction, end conventional warfare or the profiteering of the arms trade.
So what is the value of the Nobel prize, and what purpose does it serve today, beyond the whitewashing of a dead man’s impossibly blackened reputation?
The prestige of the prize, one of more than 300 such prizes in the world, has been manufactured over the years by common consent of the media, cleverly managed by the enactors of Nobel’s will, aided in no small part by the size of the award. But each year there are many dozens of nominees and this year saw a record 376 candidates. What weight can truly be placed on the opinion of the five Norwegian politicians appointed to choose among them?
As for impact, “if the purpose of the Nobel Peace Prize had been to establish peace all over the world, it would clearly have failed”, wrote Geir Lundestad, the historian who until 2014 was director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute, in 1999.
He was in accord with Nobel, who towards the end of his life wrote: “I intend to leave after my death a large fund for the promotion of the peace idea, but I am sceptical as to its results.”
He was right to be so. Since the first Nobel Peace Prize was awarded in 1901, there have been more than 250 wars in which about 80 million people have been killed – far more than in any other period of history. The credit for this scale of slaughter belongs to the industrialists who, like Nobel, “became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before”. An incalculable proportion of the dead, certainly from the first and second world wars, doubtless owe their demise to Nobel himself, but each one of those 250 wars, including that now tearing Syria apart, has depended upon the enthusiastic involvement of other men exactly like him.
The time has come to be sceptical of the prize itself and for the munificence of a long-dead Merchant of Death to be critically examined under the microscope of hindsight. Perhaps the true peace laureate will be the Nobel prize winner who sets aside the self-interest of their own limited cause and publicly rejects the award as being morally repugnant.
Jonathan Gornall is a regular contributor to The National
