Joshua Malbin

Plenty of people have offered reasoned assessments of why it was too early to award Barack Obama the Nobel Peace Prize. Plenty more have responded in an even more appropriate manner, a kind of combination faceplant-and-sputter. And Big Josh pointed to a few alternatives who make much more sense.

But this, from Matt Taibbi, is the first thing I’ve seen that goes to some effort to decode the Peace Prize…

Even when the award is given to a genuine dissident, it tends to be a dissident hailing from a country we consider outside the fold of Western civilization, a rogue state, “not one of us” — South Africa from the apartheid days, for instance, or the regime occupying East Timor.

You never, ever get a true dissident from a prominent Western country winning the award, despite the obvious appropriateness such a choice would represent. Our Western society quite openly embraces war as a means of solving problems and for quite some time now has fashioned its entire social and economic structure around the preparation for war.

…and make a strong, positive argument for why Obama was a fitting recipient:

This is what Barack Obama did to “earn” the Nobel Prize. He put the benevolent face back on things. He is a good-looking black law professor with an obvious bent for dialogue and discussion and inclusion. That he hasn’t actually reversed any of Bush’s more notorious policies — hasn’t closed Guantanamo Bay, hasn’t ended secret detentions, hasn’t amped down Iraq or Afghanistan — is another matter. What he has done is remove the stink of unilateralism from those policies.

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The Los Angeles Times today features a Gregory Rodriguez column about the importance of doubt in the response to fundamentalism. Riffing off the work of Peter L. Berger and Anton C. Zijderveld, Rodriguez offers a “modicum of uncertainty” as a corrective both to fundamentalist rhetoric and to the recently published spate of anti-religious salvos, e.g. Dawkins, Dennett, and Hitchens. (I’m naming them, he isn’t.) I thought of the fraught and troubled (and elegant) Catholicisms that come up in the work of Graham Greene or C.S. Lewis. Rodriguez does a decent job of noting, if not historicizing, the fundamentally modern characters of both American and Saudi Wahabbisms:

[M]odernity, with its technologies that move people easily across the Earth and effortlessly send ideas into cyberspace, encourages diversity. Diversity creates choices. Choices create doubt. Too much doubt can lead to desperation. (In German, the words “doubt” — Zweifel — and “desperation” — Verzweiflung — both have zwei — “two” — as their linguistic stems, suggesting mutually exclusive options.) Desperation can lead to the search for certainty. And voila — embracing certainty is the cornerstone of fundamentalism.

As a belief system, Biblical inerrancy is reactive to modernity, catalyzed by Darwin. It dates only as far back as the nineteenth century, and isn’t really imaginable before the printing press could facilitate the distribution of exact copies instead of hand-copied ones. (Hat tip to Adam Kotsko for this part, and for pointing me towards Jaroslav Pelikan.) The fundamentals aren’t fundamental, they’re turtles all the way down shoved under a body of knowledge that no longer needs their authors’ help to stand.

As a “source of tolerance toward others’ firm convictions” (Rodriguez), this kind of doubt can pry open a communicative space much like the one that Michael Berube champions for the university in What’s So Liberal about the Liberal Arts? one that shows “how to think about fundamental disagreements in human affairs, and how to conceptualize fundamental disagreements without coming to the conclusion that the people who disagree with you must be expelled or exterminated.”

It’s a welcome idea, and it recalls the good side of Obama’s sense of humor — the sense, perhaps too much a dog-whistle and too little a change of affairs, that more nuance is deserved than can be had. There’s even a case to be made that John McCain understood this, in a self-serving and cynical fashion.

But it tragically undermines his argument to conclude:

That means that, in the end, President George W. Bush was right when he said that what the fundamentalists of Al Qaeda hate most about us is our freedom. It also means that our democratic freedoms are our best weapons to fight back.

The cases for doubt and for fundamentalist shit-kicker George W. Bush simply can’t be made alongside one another. The former President’s use and abuse of the word “freedom” is best served by this movie review by Daniel Davies:

In the film Braveheart, the Mel Gibson character hardly ever stops talking about “freedom” and, of course, iconically inspires his brave clansmen to charge into battle screaming “FREEDOM!” at the top of their lungs. But in the context of the film, he’s clearly being totally hypocritical. He doesn’t actually propose anything of the sort – the system of government he’s in favour of is another autocratic monarchy, just with him in charge.

Or by an even simpler movie reference:

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“In such moments of transgression, Obama seems inherently uncomfortable with the garish décor of the imperial presidency.”

Though not, alas, with the empire.

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