There has been a lot of heat generated after the award of Nobel Peace Prize this year, at least from one particular quarter. Given the heat generated, it wasn't unexpected that the Nobel Committee would give a rejoinder, albeit masked as a satire. This post is in the context of the rejoinder by the Nobel Committee.
I received the rejoinder on social media
An amazing satirical piece by _Peter Girnus - Nobel Prize Commissioner_
I am a member of the Norwegian Nobel Committee.
There are five of us. Five people, appointed by a parliament most of the planet could not find on a map, who decide, once a year, which human being the world has agreed to call good.
I know. I know. I think about it on the tram.
We meet in a building on Henrik Ibsens gate, a street named after a man who wrote almost exclusively about people discovering they are frauds, which nobody on the committee finds funny except me. There is a room with a long table and the portraits of the dead laureates looking down, Mandela, the Dalai Lama, a great many earnest men in spectacles, and one portrait we do not discuss, which is Kissinger, 1973, awarded while the bombs were still falling, after which two of our predecessors resigned and the satirist Tom Lehrer said political satire was now obsolete. We keep him on the wall. A reminder. Every family has the uncle. It is October in Oslo, which means the sun gives up around four in the afternoon like a civil servant, and it rains the particular Norwegian rain that isn’t quite falling, just hanging there, judging you. I arrive with wet shoes. I always arrive with wet shoes. There is coffee, because this is Norway and there is always coffee, we drink more of it per person than almost anyone alive, and someone’s wife has sent kanelboller, the cinnamon buns, and we sit, five Norwegians, damp, caffeinated, sugared, and we decide the moral standing of the entire species.
Let me tell you how it actually works, because the world imagines a cathedral and it is, I promise you, a book club with a mandate.
287 nominations this year. 208 people, 79 organizations. Anyone can nominate, that’s the secret nobody understands: a professor, a parliamentarian, a former laureate, so the “nominee” list is meaningless, it’s a suggestion box, and every autumn some congressman nominates his own golden retriever and the press writes “SHORTLISTED.” Nobody is shortlisted. There is no short list the public ever sees. There is us, and the coffee, and the rain, and the portraits, and a Norwegian stubbornness that is older than the prize itself. We read reports. The institute’s advisers write them, thick dull documents, and we argue. Our chairman told the BBC once that in the final meeting “there is a high temperature.” High temperature, for a Norwegian, means someone slightly raised an eyebrow and then apologized for it. We don’t do high temperature. We do a long silence, and then Kristin says “well,” and everyone knows exactly what “well” meant, and it’s settled. That’s our shouting. “Well.” You’d have to be raised here to hear the violence in it.
Now. This year. I will not say the name, because we never say the name, but you know the name.
A certain head of state wanted this prize the way a child wants a thing in a shop window, which is to say loudly, and in public, and with the full belief that wanting it was itself the argument. He said he deserved it. He said he’d ended eight wars, a number that grew most times he said it, like a fish. He had other heads of state phone us. Israel’s prime minister posted it on the internet, “Give him the Nobel.” The leaders of Cambodia and Pakistan announced they’d nominated him, as though announcing it were part of it, as though we tally mentions. A man flew around the globe collecting endorsements for a Norwegian committee the way you’d collect signatures for a petition to the council about a noisy dog. And here, uff da, is the detail I treasure, the one that makes me smile into my coffee. The nomination deadline is the 31st of January. He took office on the 20th. So for all the phone calls, all the posts, all the gilded lobbying, the only nominations that could possibly count for this year’s prize were filed in the first eleven days of his term, before he had, by his own arithmetic, ended a single one of the eight wars. He campaigned all year for a prize whose window had shut while he was still hanging up his coat. We didn’t have to reject him. The calendar did. We just watched. Norwegians are very good at watching. We have long winters. People think we sit there weighing his deeds. We don’t. That’s the thing I can’t make the world understand. We’re not grading his homework. We don’t owe anyone the prize for a ceasefire, however real, however loud the announcement. “He made peace” is not a sentence that ends in a medal, the way he believes it does, the way he believes every good thing ends in his name on it. The will of a dead Swede says the prize goes to whoever did the most for fraternity between nations. A dead Swede, I should add, who made his entire fortune inventing dynamite and selling arms, and spent his last years horrified at his own obituary, which called him a merchant of death, and so bought his way to immortality as a man of peace. The whole prize is one guilty arms dealer’s attempt to launder his name. We are, all of us, administering a dead man’s public relations. I find this clarifying. It keeps me humble. It should keep everyone humble, and it keeps, by my count, no one humble at all.
So who did we give it to?
An eighty-five-year-old woman. A judge. Born in Durban, under apartheid, granddaughter of a Tamil man who came to South Africa as indentured labor, a bus driver’s daughter from the poor Indian quarter, who became the first non-white woman to run a law practice in her province, who defended Mandela’s people when defending them was dangerous, who sat on the Rwanda tribunal and the court at the Hague, and who, at eighty-five, is right now a judge weighing whether a genocide is a genocide. When we told the world, our chairman said the rule of law “underpins the system we have set up to ensure peace,” and that “peace requires justice.” She wasn’t even in Oslo. She was in Nuremberg. In courtroom 600. The actual room where they tried the Nazis. You cannot stage that. God staged that, and God, it turns out, is a better satirist than any of us. She did not phone us. She did not post. No prime minister demanded it for her on the internet. She had, as far as our deliberations are concerned, the one qualification the loud man could never manufacture, which is that she wanted the work and not the medal. The medal finds those people. It flees the ones who chase it. This is not a rule we wrote. It’s just the only pattern the hundred-odd years of our mistakes has ever shown.
The reaction from across the ocean was immediate. His spokesman posted that we “place politics over peace.” Ja. Perhaps. We’re five damp pensioners in a rainy city; of course it’s political, it was always political, it was political when we gave it to a sitting American president nine months into his first term for the promise of things he had not yet done, and we have been quietly embarrassed about that one for fifteen years, so believe me, we had a particular reason this year to prefer a woman with fifty years of verdicts behind her over a man with eight wars in front of him and a deadline already behind him. Here is what he will never understand, the thing I’d tell him on the tram if he ever took one. We are the one prize he cannot buy, cannot post his way to, cannot have a friendly dictator phone in for him. Not because we’re incorruptible, nei, we’re as vain and wrong and human as the portraits on our wall. But because the entire point of the thing, the only power a small cold country’s book club has ever held, is that it goes to the person not performing the wanting. The moment you demand it, you’ve proven you don’t understand what it’s for, and proving that is itself the disqualification. He ran the most expensive campaign in the history of the prize and the campaign was the reason. He was never losing to Navi Pillay. He was losing to the concept.
It’s dark now. Four o’clock dark. The buns are gone. Kristin said “well” an hour ago and we all went home. I’m on the tram with my wet shoes, and somewhere across the water a very powerful man is explaining to a camera that the prize is rigged, that we’re corrupt, that he’ll win it next year, and he genuinely might, we’re only five idiots and we’ve been wrong before, Kissinger is still on the wall. But not this year. This year an old woman in Nuremberg, in the room where the law once stared down the exact kind of man who thinks wanting a thing loudly enough should make it his, got a phone call she didn’t ask for. That’s the job. We don’t reward the man who ends the war and announces it. We reward the woman who spent fifty years deciding what a war was.He’ll never see the difference. That’s rather the whole point of him.
Takk for i dag. I have to change trams.
The year before last I had researched on the criterion for upvoting a candidate for Nobel Prize. From the results of the search it is clear that the above piece is not a satire at all. The piece is trying to tell the world that despite its small mistakes, it remains the most impartial method to grant a Nobel prize. The mention of the wet shoes, tram travel, and coffee is to tell the world that not-so-rich people (read, ordinary people) make the choice.
Really, just five Norwegians decide who gets the Nobel Peace prize? And the main criterion (as per this forward) is to distinguish between who 'wants' the prize, and who just works diligently, unobtrusively without any goal set for himself/herself to get the prize. Really? Also read the criterion for Nobel prize for other disciplines: it looks like that the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet, and the Swedish Academy hold the wisdom of this Universe. You will find from the chat below that Nobel Peace Prize criterion is a little different from other prizes. It can actually be at a whim of the Nobel Committee. Interestingly, the writer of the piece says that the person who created the corpus for the Nobel prizes, including for the Nobel Peace prize, was the one who made millions through his patent for dynamite. The writer of the piece suggests that the corpus creator was probably easing his conscience. I would argue that the writer himself is trying to clear his conscience while making the distinction between 'wanting the prize' versus 'Bhagvad Gita's dictum of carrying on with the good work while remaining agnostic to the results of the work.'
Do you wonder ever why Mr Bose of Bharat, and Gandhiji never got the prize in each's area of work?
My search prompt:
How are Nobel prize winners chosen? Who up votes a particular individual? Can anyone propose anyone's name?
The Search Result:
Yes. The Nobel system is a little different from the way one might imagine a prize competition. There is no public nomination followed by a public vote. It is a multi-stage, highly confidential process.
1. Who can nominate someone?
For most Nobel Prizes, you cannot simply send in a nomination.
Every year, the relevant Nobel Committee sends confidential invitations to thousands of people who are considered qualified to nominate—such as:
- university professors and researchers,
- members of national academies,
- previous Nobel laureates,
- members of the relevant Nobel committees,
- and, depending on the prize, other qualified people.
The selection of nominators is designed to give broad international and institutional representation. [Nobel Prize](https://www.nobelprize.org/nomination?trk=public_post_comment-text\&utm_source=chatgpt.com)
For example, for Physics, the rules specifically include members of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Physics Nobel Committee members, Physics Nobel laureates, certain professors, and professors at universities selected by the Academy. [Nobel Prize](https://www.nobelprize.org/physics/?utm_source=chatgpt.com)
And self-nomination is not allowed.
2. Can a nominator propose anyone?
Essentially, yes.
A qualified nominator can propose a person whom they believe deserves the prize. There isn't a pre-existing official "candidate list" from which they must choose.
So, hypothetically, Professor X receives a Nobel nomination form and can write:
"I nominate Professor Y because of Y's discovery of..."
Professor Y doesn't have to have been previously shortlisted.
Multiple people can nominate the same person, and someone can be nominated repeatedly over many years. [Nobel Prize](https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2024/05/annual-review-2023.pdf?utm_source=chatgpt.com)
But there's an important distinction:
Being nominated is not itself a Nobel endorsement. A person may be nominated many times and never come close to winning.
3. What happens after the nominations?
This is where the interesting part begins.
Suppose 500 people nominate 100 different physicists.
The Nobel Committee for Physics examines the nominations and gradually reduces the field. It also obtains assessments from specially appointed experts.
The process roughly looks like:
Thousands of nominations
↓
Nobel Committee examines them
↓
Preliminary candidates
↓
Detailed examination + outside expert opinions
↓
Nobel Committee prepares its recommendation
↓
Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences discusses it
↓
Academy votes
↓
Laureate
For Physics, the final decision is made by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences through a majority vote. [Nobel Prize](https://www.nobelprize.org/physics/?utm_source=chatgpt.com)
So your phrase "Who up-votes a particular individual?" is actually quite apt—but the "up-voting" occurs at several stages and is not an internet-style vote.
4. The Nobel Committee does not necessarily have the final say
This is an important subtlety.
For Physics and Chemistry, for example, the Nobel Committee investigates the candidates and makes recommendations, but the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences makes the final decision.
The Academy can, in principle, modify the Committee's recommendation or consider another proposal. [Nobel Prize](https://www.nobelprize.org/organization/statutes-for-the-prizes-awarded-by-the-royal-academy-of-sciences/?utm_source=chatgpt.com)
The same general architecture applies to several prizes:
| Prize | Final awarding body |
| Physics | Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences |
| Chemistry| Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences |
| Physiology/Medicine| Nobel Assembly,Karolinska Institutet|
| Literature | Swedish Academy |
| Peace | Norwegian Nobel Committee |
| Economic Sciences| Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences |
There is one major structural difference: the Norwegian Nobel Committee both evaluates and selects the Peace Prize recipient, whereas the other prize-awarding institutions have separate committees that prepare recommendations. [Nobel Prize](https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2024/05/annual-review-2023.pdf?utm_source=chatgpt.com)
5. What about the Peace Prize?
This is the interesting exception to your question.
The pool of people entitled to nominate candidates for the Nobel Peace Prize is much broader. A nomination does not require the same kind of invitation as the scientific prizes; thousands of people around the world can submit nominations if they fall within the specified categories of eligible nominators. [Nobel Prize](https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/facts/facts-on-the-nobel-peace-prize/?utm_source=chatgpt.com)
So someone being nominated for the Peace Prize tells you considerably less about an institutional endorsement than people sometimes assume.
6. And all of this is secret for 50 years .This is perhaps the strangest part.
The Nobel institutions do not reveal who was nominated, who nominated whom, or the discussions surrounding the nominations for 50 years. [Nobel Prize](https://www.nobelprize.org/nomination?trk=public_post_comment-text\&utm_source=chatgpt.com). That's why, for example, when newspapers today say: "X has been nominated for the Nobel Prize"
there is often an important qualification: we don't necessarily know that from the Nobel Committee.The Nobel institution itself will not confirm current nominations.
After 50 years, however, the nomination archive becomes available, and one can see some fascinating historical patterns—who nominated whom, how many times someone was nominated, etc. [Nobel Prize](https://www.nobelprize.org/nomination/map1/nominees.php?utm_source=chatgpt.com)
So, in a nutshell:
Nomination is a wide funnel → expert examination narrows it → Nobel Committee recommends → the appropriate awarding institution makes the final decision, generally by voting.
And crucially, there is no public "vote for your favourite Nobel candidate." The final vote is taken by a relatively small group within the institution responsible for that particular prize.
