From Destructive Roots, Nobel Nurtures Peace
Pomp.
And circumstance.
First the pomp: A sparkling Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden gliding down the red-carpeted staircase on the arm of San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown in the grand rotunda of City Hall. Champagne toasts by His Excellencies and Her Majesties. Trumpet fanfares and jewels.
Now the circumstance: An inventor discovers a better way to blow things up, decides he doesn’t want to go down in history as a merchant of death, so to shine up his posthumous reputation bequeaths his entire colossal estate to work that “benefits mankind.”
The man of circumstance was Alfred Nobel. The occasion for the pomp was the 100th anniversary of the Nobel Prize, celebrated throughout California in recent weeks with special pride, since the Golden State seems to have a golden touch when it comes to bringing home the heavy gold medals.
The celebrations were also an occasion to reflect on the truly singular lesson Nobel left behind--far more important, in the long run, than all the glitter. In short: the power of an individual to change the world.
The prize is nothing if not a personal reflection of Alfred Nobel himself. He directed that prizes be awarded in categories that reflected his peculiar interests: chemistry, physics and medicine but also literature (he wanted at one time to be an author) and peace (an antidote for his own brand of poison?).
As a scientist, Nobel knew a thing or two about leverage. Since the first Nobel Prize was handed out in 1901, more than 700 laureates have been honored. It’s become arguably the most important prize in the history of the civilized world.
Sweden and Norway (which gives the peace prize) are small countries that have become pivotal (at least to scientists and peace-brokers) because of Nobel’s bequest.
Like most interesting people, Nobel was a complicated man.
His early experiments with nitroglycerine killed several people, including his brother, but he forged on. He sold dynamite to armies on both sides of conflicts. “It is fiendish things we are working on,” he said. “But they are so interesting as purely technical problems.”
At the same time, he cared passionately about peace. Nobel “dreamed of an explosion so powerful that its very existence would make war altogether impossible,” literature laureate Nadine Gordimer says in a documentary on the prize to be aired Dec. 15 on PBS. So much like the physicists who invented the atomic bomb to stop Hitler. So much like the “war to end all wars.”
Did Nobel realize his impossible dream? War is obviously very much still with us.
And the prizes themselves are notoriously skewed. Peace and literature, in particular, tend to get political (nothing new there). Some important fields (such as astronomy) aren’t represented. Prizes have been given to the right person for the wrong discovery (Einstein did not win for relativity); to the wrong people for the right discovery (let me count the ways); for the wrong discovery (would you believe prefrontal lobotomy?) Far too few women have been honored.
“The only people the Nobel prize is absolutely good for is Sweden, my mother, [my university],” said one laureate friend (I’ll leave him and his institution anonymous).
There’s a lot of anguish for the losers, and sometimes a downside even for winners. Suddenly, people are more interested in the laureate than the person behind the prize, my friend said: “And they ask: ‘What have you done lately?’ If they ask enough, I begin to wonder myself.”
And yet, he thinks the very existence of the prize does much to inspire young people. An old girlfriend recently reminded him that when he was a teenager, he’d told her he wanted to win a Nobel prize. He did.
“Maybe nerdy kids need that,” he said. “Especially in a society that finds its heroes on the basketball court.”
Many laureates have gone on to become great spokespersons for science, or peace, or literature. That’s an enormous service in itself.
I like Nobel’s prize for a different reason:
Where else can you find chemistry and physics and literature and peace celebrated under the same umbrella?
Nobel saw that all were of a piece. Wordsmiths, peacemakers, science nerds, stargazers, lab rats--all are involved in the same human enterprise: trying to make sense of the universe in which we live.
He not only ignored the usual segregation of categories (science or politics or art), he brushed aside national boundaries--insisting that the prizes be awarded without regard to nationality.
To top it off, he added an explicitly moral imperative: It is not enough to make discoveries. The prizes go to those who “have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind.”
Perhaps some present-day moguls enamored of pomp and lucky of circumstance could take his cue.
After all, as Nobel said: “Contentment is the only real wealth.”
*
K.C. Cole can be reached at cole.kc@latimes.com.
