Even though at first I really, truly thought I was reading an Onion headline when I saw "Barack Obama Wins Nobel Prize" yesterday… and even though I'm really thankful that skepticism about this particular honor appears to be largely (if, as is to be expected, unequally) bipartisan and not another cause for major, ugly division…
I think the Nobel committee are demonstrating that they're rational actors here. It's just that their motivations aren't the motivations that people expect them to have, and the power they have to act is less (and more) than people realize.
The people of the Nobel committee do not, actually, possess a special power to identify individuals that have accomplished extraordinary feats to reduce world conflict and promote peace between peoples. Even less do they possess the power to recognize less fruitful but no less heroic efforts toward that goal. Any of us can do the same with a decent Internet connection.
Nor is the ability to give away a chunk of cash to a deserving recipient particularly special. Lots of organizations and individuals do this every year.
What they do uniquely possess — and I am sure they are aware of this — is a peculiar power to send a message of approval, a message that will be repeated in the world's large media outlets and so be sure to be heard. And that's the power they are deploying every year: the power to say "We approve of this person or this organization."
They also possess — again, this is a unique thing — a certain moral authority that commands respect. I don't know what the worldwide "approval rating" of the Nobel Peace Prize committee would be if you took a poll, but I have to think that it's pretty high and pretty evenly spread out, compared to other similarly visible global groups.
The power to send messages will continue, I think. But the moral authority, the worldwide respect, can be lost, or diluted, or restricted to a smaller group of sycophants. I expect that it depends largely on people's perception of whether the messages they send are consistent with the group's stated purpose.
So anyway, I suspect the Nobel committee was (rationally, and in accord with their actual rather than imaginary special powers) trying to do this with the Prize:
(1) To send a message to the people of the United States that the committee approves of our selection of Barack Obama as president. (Remember, they don't care that much about our domestic policy of any kind. It's not really on their radar. Think foreign policy alone.)
(2) To send a message to Barack Obama that they expect him to promote the Nobel committee's visible and stated and public purpose of promoting peace.
Nothing unexpected here. Since we are dealing with an organization, of course, and since some sort of law states that every organization's first purpose is self-perpetuation, we can probably add this third purpose:
(3) To increase their organization's world stature and moral authority, by associating the name "Nobel Prize Winner" with President Barack Obama, a name they are betting will continue to be regarded highly on the world stage (not the domestic stage — remember, you have to separate the two, we're talking about people outside the US here) for a long time.
Whether their actions actually give them the results they hope for … we'll have to see. But let's not forget the opportunity cost here. They could have used their power to draw attention — and attention means funds — to some little, unknown organization that's doing great good somewhere, somewhere where attention and funds could make the difference between success and failure. They chose a different path, a glitzier one to be sure. The world rarely remembers the choices that could have been made, but weren't.
(Next time I'll complain about the Nobel Prize in Physics. I promise.)
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