The Nobel Peace Prize 2011

Alfred Nobel was interested in social issues. He developed a special engagement in the peace movement. An important factor in Nobel’s interest in peace was his acquaintance with Bertha von Suttner. Perhaps his interest in peace was also due to the use of his inventions in warfare and assassination attempts? Peace was the fifth and final prize area that Nobel mentioned in his will.

Henry Dunant, founder of the Red Cross, shared the first Nobel Peace Prize in 1901 with Frédéric Passy, a leading international pacifist of the time. In addition to humanitarian efforts and peace movements, the Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded for work in a wide range of fields including advocacy of human rights, mediation of international conflicts, and arms control.

The Nobel Peace Prize is awarded by a committee of five persons who are chosen by the Norwegian Storting (Parliament of Norway), Oslo, Norway.
The Nobel Peace Prize 2011 was awarded jointly to Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Leymah Gbowee and Tawakkol Karman "for their non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights to full participation in peace-building work".

Fighting talk from the prophet of peace

Pinker's assault on the common reader began in 1994 with The Language Instinct, an accessible introduction to the idea that humans are "language animals", biologically wired for linguistic communication. In 1997 he published How the Mind Works, which went beyond language to offer a similar portrayal of the rest of the mind, from vision and reasoning to emotions, humour and art. In 1999 he returned to the question of language with Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language, which drew on his research on regular and irregular verbs as a way of explaining how language works in general.

And in 2002 he published The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, which is basically an attack on what Pinker sees as three great misconceptions about human behaviour: the idea that the mind is a tabula rasa, a blank slate that is wholly shaped by one's environment; the notion of the "noble savage", the idea that humans are intrinsically good but get warped by society; and "ghost in the machine" theories that postulate the existence of a non-biological agent in the brain that can alter human nature at will.

This is a big idea if ever I saw one, and it requires a massive tome (700 pages plus footnotes) to deal with it. In the first place, Pinker has to locate, analyse and explain the empirical and other data that support his thesis: that, however you measure it, the past was not just a different country, but also a far more violent one. And then he has to provide some explanations for why the long-term reduction in violence happened. To do that he ranges far beyond his own professional territory – into forensic archaeology, political philosophy, intellectual and social history, population dynamics, statistics and international relations. He identifies a number of forces that were key factors in curbing mankind's capacity for inhumanity: the slow emergence of states capable of playing the role of Hobbes's "Leviathan"; the pacifying impact of commerce and trade on behaviour; the impact of the Enlightenment on the way people thought about others; the evolution of notions of etiquette over the centuries; the way print and literacy expanded the "circle of empathy" beyond people's immediate family; the importance of women in civilising men; and the "long peace" that followed the second world war.