From Wikipedia:

According to Nobel’s will, the Peace Prize should be awarded “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.”

People seem to forget some­times that not every­thing revolves around America and our cul­tural view­point. The per­sons who select the winner of a Nobel prize are appointed by the Nor­we­gian Par­lia­ment, and are likely to have a slightly dif­ferent view of the world – and of our own country – than we do. What they do they do for their own rea­sons, and prob­ably not without delib­er­a­tion and debate.

Peace is a the­o­ret­ical con­struct, like infinity, per­fec­tion and a fric­tion­less sur­face. Human nature, mate­rial need, the Law of Con­ser­va­tion of Mass, and the First Law of Ther­mo­dy­namics col­lec­tively sug­gest that there will never be peace on this planet. How­ever, just because it’s impos­sible doesn’t mean there isn’t honor in the pur­suit of it. Over the last eight years or so, this country’s gov­ern­ment has oper­ated (more or less) under what was quite dra­mat­i­cally called “The Bush Doc­trine” and the policy of pre­ven­ta­tive war. This was a tacit accep­tance of the fact that there will never be peace on this earth and a rejec­tion of the pur­suit of the impos­sible. It’s a very prag­matic and sad view of the world (like many other views of the world held by polit­ical con­ser­v­a­tives) that see us never being able to be better than we are, and there­fore fol­lowing a policy of pro­tecting and enriching the self at the expense of a flawed and dan­gerous “other”. It is a view that sees an absence of peace and rec­og­nizes everyone is a poten­tial enemy.

In stark con­trast to that view, we now have an admin­is­tra­tion headed by Barack Obama. Here is a pres­i­dent who real­izes not only the nobility of the pur­suit of peace, but it’s impor­tance from a strategic per­spec­tive. This is a view that sees the value in pur­suing that which is impos­sible and hopes we might one day vio­late the laws of physics, defy our darker natures, and glide effort­lessly along that fric­tion­less sur­face into a future where we will be acted upon by an external force.

I can only imagine what this philo­soph­ical shift in our country’s atti­tude toward the rest of the world looks like to people in other coun­tries. We must be like Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde – one mind with oppo­site natures, dia­met­ri­cally opposed, expressed one at a time in our out­ward face. In 2009 we were sud­denly another person – although the specter of our darker nature still roils beneath the sur­face, waiting to emerge again.

I per­son­ally don’t believe the Nobel Prize need nec­es­sarily award accom­plish­ment. Peace will never be accom­plished. But here is a head of state who has shifted an entire country in a direc­tion that works toward that impos­sible goal instead of away from it. And that is laudable.

I do have to wonder, how­ever, how many other people in his­tory have had to apol­o­gize for win­ning the Nobel Peace Prize. Would people really ques­tion him if he weren’t so young or so black? How many head­lines would be printed about the Nobel Prize being a lia­bility of this were Huck­abee, or Bush?