Al Gore and the Mission of the Nobel Prizes (This Choice Marks the end of a 105-year era)

American Thinker ^ | 10/12/2007 | John Berlau

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October 12, 2007

Al Gore and the Mission of the Nobel Prizes

By John Berlau

Al Gore has won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. This choice, more than any other Nobel Committee selection, marks the end of a 105-year era. In direct contradiction of Alfred Nobel's last will and testament, the selection of Gore essentially means the Peace Prize can no longer be said to be an award for improving the condition of humankind. Looking at Gore's writing, it's far from clear that Gore even believes that humanity is his most important priority.

Not that there haven't been controversial or dubious selections before. Jimmy Carter was selected by the committee in 2002 in what was partly a political swipe at the Bush administration's foreign policy. Yasser Arafat was given the Peace Prize despite his ordering the killing of scores of innocent civilians.

But, at the very least, the stated aims of Carter and even Arafat were the improvement of human life. Gore, by contrast, does not even profess improving the human condition as his fundamental goal. Rather, his stated desire is to stop human activity that he sees as ruining what he calls the "ecosystem." Awarding the prize to Gore in 2007 is the equivalent of honoring the Luddites who tried to stop the beneficial technologies of Alfred Nobels's day.

A common theme of selection for the Nobel Peace Prize and the other Nobel awards has been the use of science and technology to overcome problems afflicting humans such as starvation and disease. This fulfills the vision of Swedish inventor and entrepreneur Nobel, who pioneered the product of dynamite. For the first time, an explosive device could be stored safely and detonate predictably on a large scale. Nobel's products were used for war, as even the most primitive explosives had been for centuries. But dynamite also vastly improved the 19^th and 20^th century standard of living through its use in the construction of buildings, railroad tunnels, and sea passages such as the Panama Canal.

In creating the annual prizes for physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, and the promotion of world peace (roughly the same five fields for which Nobels are awarded today  today), Nobel stated the desire in his will to honor

"those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind."

According to Alfred Nobel: A Biograpy by Kenne Fant, an earlier draft of Nobel's will stipulated that prizes in all categories should be

"a reward for the most important pioneering discoveries or works in the field of knowledge and progress."

But for Albert Gore, Jr. the fields of knowledge and progress are suspect, and so are many types of technology with benefits to mankind. This is a man who speaks despairingly of "our civilization" and sees as flawed man's attempt to rise above "nature." He describes global warming as "the category 5 collision between our civilization - as we currently pursue it - and the earth's environment."

He has been critical of "civilization" and human technological advancement even before global warming became his main issue. In the introduction to his 1992 book  Earth in the Balance, Gore writes,

"In one sense, civilization itself has been on a journey from its foundations in the world of nature to an ever more contrived, controlled and manufactured world of our own imitative and sometimes arrogant design. And in my view, the price has been high."

But exactly what part of "controlling" and "contriving" does Gore object to?  Does he really think the price of curing diseases through new drugs or feeding the world through advance farming techniques been too "high." In many passages of his writing, the answer seems to be yes. This puts him conflict with the vision of Nobel as well as that of many of the previous prize recipients honored for their pioneering achievements in agriculture or medicine.

Several Nobel prizes, for instances, have honored life-saving breakthroughs in stopping cancer. But in Earth in the Balance, Gore wonders aloud whether cancer treatments should be used if they would result in the harvesting of what he considers to be to be too many trees. On page 119 he writes:

"The Pacific Yew can be cut down and processed to produce a potent chemical, taxol, which offers some promise of curing certain forms of lung, breast, and ovarian cancer in patients who would otherwise quickly die. It seems an easy choice - sacrifice the tree for a human life - until one learns that three trees must be destroyed for each patient treated."

As Gore's apologists have pointed out, he does later in the passage list one of his reasons as saving some trees for future generations. But there is no discussion in Gore's passage about a basic solution to this dilemma -- simply plant new groves of yews!  Thus, he still seems to be giving the life of an old Pacific Yew a competing claim with a dying cancer patient.

But it's not just cancer patients that come into Gore's technological crosshairs. Gore also points out the supposedly dire effect on nature of growing more food to feed the hungry. Ironically, he blasts what is called the "green revolution," the high-yield farming and plant breeding that has made countries like India and Pakistan self-sustaining in agriculture. Norman Borlaug won the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize for pioneering these techniques and bringing them to the Third World.

But in Earth in the Balance Gore decries "the much-heralded Green Revolution" as well as biotechnology that promises to further revolutionize agriculture. Gore concedes,

"To be sure, these same new ‘miracle crops' ... have temporarily conquered hunger in a few of the Third World Nations."

But, he concludes,

"the higher yields made possible by genetically altered crop strains often cannot be sustained over time, as the pests and blights catch up to them and as overirrigation and overfertilizing take their toll on soil productivity."

Modern farming techniques, he writes, are

"a set of dangerous bargains with the future worthy of the theatrical legend that haunted the birth of the scientific revolution: Dr. Faustus."

This is an example of how Gore alarms and misleads at the same time. Yes, any agricultural improvement may have negative side effects that need to be fixed. But India's "temporary" conquering of hunger has lasted 40 years, and the nation is now a net grain exporter. Borlaug has also been honored by politicians of both parties, as he is a senior consultant to the Carter Center and was surrounded by President Bush and the House and Senate leaders Pelosi and Reid when he received the Congressional Gold Medal this July. Gore's disparaging of Borlaug's prize-winning achievement shows how far out of the scientific mainstream Gore is on this and other issues.

Unfortunately, Gore still has plenty of influence as an ambassador of science to the media and lay public, and a Nobel Peace Prize may magnify this even more. The results of honoring Gore's dishonoring of human progress could be tragic and devastating. Look no further than Gore's tirades against another Nobel-winning achievement: the life-saving insecticide DDT.

The Nobel Committee recognized DDT's immeasurable contribution to public health. In 1948, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Paul Hermann Muller, the Swiss chemist who discovered DDT's effectiveness at combating the insects that spread deadly diseases. As the Nobel web site entry for Dr. Muller states, "Field trials now showed it [DDT] to be effective not only against the common housefly, but also against a wide variety of pests, including the louse, Colorado beetle, and mosquito," The web site notes further that during World War II, DDT "proved to be of enormous value in combating typhus and malaria -- malaria was, in fact, completely eradicated from many island areas."

And after World War II, DDT eradicated malaria in vast areas of the world, including parts of the southern United States. But it was vilified in the 1962 book "Silent Spring" written by Rachel Carson, a woman Gore has called a heroine. As a result of the ensuing U.S. and worldwide near-prohibition on making DDT, several millions have died in Africa from mosquito-borne malaria that DDT could prevent.

Even after the turnabout by the World Health Organization, the New York Times and other establishment venues, Gore has never once said that Rachel Carson was wrong. As late as 1996, he called DDT a "notorious compound" that "presented serious human health risks." The tragedy is that on this issue, Gore could have used his tremendous political capital to make a difference in reducing malaria deaths.

And Gore is still hindering anti-malaria efforts by spreading misinformation about its main causes. In his movie and book An Inconvenient Truth, Gore blames global warming for recent outbreaks of malaria in the cooler regions of Kenya. But as I have reported in my book Eco-Freaks and elsewhere, the World Health Organization had documented epidemics in those very regions in the 1940s, long before global warming was on the radar screen. The malaria was wiped out there, as elsewhere, by DDT, and unfortunately, as elsewhere, has now returned in the absence of DDT's use.

Also unfortunate is that the establishment media for the most part has not seen fit to correct Gore on this and many other dangerous misstatements in An Inconvenient Truth. Now, they may be even less inclined to do so. Never before would the awarding of a Nobel Prize have to potential to due so much damage to public health and human progress. If the Nobel Committee goes with the "politically correct" winds, it is incumbent on every Nobel laureate who cares about the legacy of Alfred Nobel to denounce this terrible decision.

Updated 9:02 AM EDT

John Berlau is a policy director at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and author of the Amazon best-selling book Eco-Freaks.

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/10/al_gore_and_the_mission_of_the.html at October 12, 2007 - 11:21:19 AM EDT

[Dustbunny]

Unbelievable that they chose Gore! What has he ever done to promote peace.

Nobel Prizes have lost all credibility since they awarded one to little Jimmy Carter.

[AngelesCrestHighway]

This chucklehead deserves a peace prize?...for what? They may as well start handing peace prizes out in cracker jack boxes....

[Gondring]

“Fred” used to mean “peace” in Norwegian. I guess now it means “Profiteer.”

[SolidWood]

Arafat was the Jump the shark moment.

[Lockbox]

What’s next Bill Clinton wins a Nobel Piece prize?

Think about it............

[N. Theknow]

Nobel peace Prize originated by someone who invented a way to blow things up.

2007 Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Algore, who just blows.

[SirLinksalot]

Nobel Prizes have lost all credibility since they awarded one to little Jimmy Carter

For me, the credibility was lost when Yaser Arafat won the prize decades earlier. If his Intifada and tacit approval and support of suicide bombings did not cause the Committee to withdraw their prize, then that tells me that the whole Peace Prize thing is a political joke.

[Publius6961]

Nobel Prizes have lost all credibility since they awarded one to little Jimmy Carter.

The political perversion of a historical honor happened rather abruptly, in my view but only, it seems, for the so-called "peace prize"...

Great company for the Gore-man.
The fake Rigoberta Menchu...
Jimmy Carter...
Yassir Arafat...

All fake, but true.

Just saying.

[agere_contra]

The good news is that the Peace Prize has now been linked to a disprovable (and disproved) philosophy. Its the beginning of the end for the PP.

[The Great RJ]

At least Gore wasn’t awarded a Nobel Prize for any science...Gore’s global warming pitch is pure snake oil and pseudo science and is an insult to rational scientific inquiry. The very fact that Gore and his adherents call those who might question the veracity of any part of his global warming hypothesis “deniers” puts him in the same category as the Inquisition was to Galileo.

[garyhope]

Arafat, Carter, Gore. Ridiculous. Scandalous, absurd, pathetic.

Birds of a rotten, stinking feather.

Lying evil scumbags.

[kenmcg]

When one looks at some of the other nitwits that won the Nobel Peace prize it loses its lustre. Jimmy Carter, Kofi Anan, Arafat et al.have also been winners.

[Ditto]

Unbelievable that they chose Gore! What has he ever done to promote peace.

The Nobel committee was long ago taken over by international socialists and they make their awards strictly based upon the contribution to the advancement of socialism made by the nominees. When looked at it in that light, Gore is indeed deserving because if he and the left are able to destroy the Western world's economy with their junk science, it would be the greatest event in the long ugly history of the socialist movement regardless of how many wars and how many deaths it may cause.

[ASOC]

The Nobel Peace prise has been increasingly marginalized over the years by the Left-leaning (or outright Leftest) committee members and the choices they make.

Bottom line - for most Americans, WGAS?

[SirLinksalot]

Oh, BTW, let's not forget this other Undeserving Peace Prize winner -- RIGOBERTA MANCHU of Guatemala.

Read this article : ====================================================

LIAR, RIGOBERTA MENCHU

Fraudulent Storyteller Still Praised

by Dinesh D’Souza

I confess to having been mildly embarrassed when Rigoberta Menchu, Guatemalan political activist and author of I, Rigoberta Menchu, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992. The Chronicle of Higher Education called the very day her prize was announced and reminded me that in my book Illiberal Education the year before, I had harshly criticized Menchu’s autobiography as a sadly typical example of the bogus multi-cultural agitprop that was displacing the Western classics on the reading lists for undergraduates at elite universities like Stanford.

“Now that Rigoberta has won the Nobel Prize,” the reporter asked, “what is your reaction?”

“All I can say,” I replied, “is that I am relieved she didn’t win for literature.”

For Rigoberta, the Nobel Prize proved to be a canonization in both senses of the term. This obscure Indian woman who published her 1983 autobiography when she was still in her mid ‘20s, suddenly received worldwide recognition as a leftist icon — a modern-day Saint Sebastian, pierced by the arrows of racist discrimination and colonial exploitation. She received several honorary doctorates and in 1992 was nominated as a United Nations goodwill ambassador and special representative of indigenous peoples. Her book, haled as a first-person account of Guatemalan bigotry and brutality against native Indians, spread from cutting-edge curricula like Stanford’s to become part of the canon of required and frequently assigned readings in high schools and universities around the globe.

Then, just last week, the New York Times revealed that much of I, Rigoberta Menchu is a fabrication. Times reporter Larry Rohter corroborated the research of an American anthropologist, David Stoll, whose interview with over a hundred people and archival research during the past decade led him to conclude that Rigoberta’s story “cannot be the eyewitness account it purports to be.”

For example, in one of the most moving scenes in the book, Rigoberta describes how she watched her brother Nicolas die of malnutrition. But the New York Times found Nicolas alive and well enough to be running a relatively prosperous homestead in a Guatemalan village. According to members of Rigoberta’s own family, as well as residents of her village, she also fabricated her account of how a second brother was burned alive by army troops as her parents were forced to watch.

Central to Rigoberta’s story — and the supposed source of her Marxism — is a land dispute in which her impoverished family, working for slave wages on plantations, is intimidated and oppressed by wealthy landowners of European descent. Those nefarious oligarchs supposedly manipulated the government into forcing the Menchu family and other poor Indians off unclaimed land that they had farmed. According to the locals, however, this dispute was really a land feud that pitted Rigoberta’s father against his in-laws. “If was a family quarrel that went on for years and years,” Efrain Galindo, the mayor of the town, told Rohter. “I wanted peace, but none of us could get them to negotiate a settlement.”

Even on small matters, Rigoberta’s account turns out to be unreliable. On the very first page of her autobiography, Rigoberta says that she “never went to school” and only learned Spanish as an adult. In fact, she received the equivalent of a middle school education as a scholarship student at two prestigious private boarding schools operated by Catholic nuns. Her half-sister Rosa Menchu confirms that since Rigoberta spent much of her youth in boarding schools, she could not possibly have worked as a political organizer and labored up to eight months a year on coffee and cotton plantations, as described in considerable detail in her autobiography.

None of this is to deny that Rigoberta’s family, like many Guatemalans, suffered greatly during that country’s long civil war. Both her parents were killed in that bloody conflict. But Rigoberta’s account of the tragedy can no longer be trusted. “The book is one lie after another, and she knows it,” Alfonso Rivera, a municipal clerk who kept all official records for the area for three decades, told the Times.

No less interesting than these revelations has been the reaction to them by Rigoberta Menchu, her champions and advocates. Rigoberta herself senses a racist plot and denounces her critics for “political provocations.” The Nobel committee, having found Rigoberta a suitably obscure and politically correct candidate for its peace prize in 1992, the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s landing in North America, said that it will not rescind the prize even though her only credential for winning was her life story, as narrated in her autobiography.

Equally recalcitrant is the academic community that enshrined, I, Rigoberta Menchu in the multicultural canon in American colleges and universities. The Rigoberta Menchu Foundation, based in New York, boasts that her book is one of the most widely read in classrooms in American and Europe. My cursory check at such leading universities as Stanford, Columbia and Princeton shows that I, Rigoberta Menchu is still widely assigned. So many high schools use the book that there is even a textbook,Teaching and Testimony: Rigoberta Menchu and the North American Classroom, about how to teach Rigoberta Menchu’s life story.

According to reporter Robin Wilson of the Chronicle of Higher Education, who has been calling professors around the country who teach I, Rigoberta Menchu, most of them are outraged — not with Menchu for making things up, but with anthropologist David Stoll for exposing her fraud. Virtually all of the professors Wilson contacted defiantly told her that they would not stop assigning I, Rigoberta Menchu to their students.

Some of this may be the defensiveness of those in shock. But still it raises the question of how universities, supposedly dedicated to truth and critical thinking, can continue to teach a book that is full of falsehoods. For now, Rigoberta’s academic fan club resorts to what may be termed the Tawana Brawley defense, named after the New York teenager who faked a racially motivated rape. The lawyers and civil rights activists who defended Brawley said it didn’t matter that she had concocted her tale, because a racist society causes such desperation. As legal scholar Patricia Williams put it, “No mater who did it to her, and even if she did it to herself, Tawana Brawley has been the victim of some unspeakable violation.”

In a similar vein, Rigoberta apologists like Marjori Agosin of Wellesley College now argue that whether or not Rigoberta’s autobiography was faked, the native Indians of Guatemala have endured unimaginable hardships, the death squads of Latin America were a reality of the 1970s and 1980s, and so despite a few inconveniences of detail, the general message of I, Rigoberta Menchu is essentially true.

But of course the legitimacy of teaching Guatemalan social and political history is not in dispute. The issue is whether I, Rigoberta Menchu deserves a central place in the liberal arts curriculum. Even Rigoberta’s strongest defenders, like Stanford anthropologist Renato Rosaldo, have never maintained that this young woman’s autobiography is great literature. If it were, then the claim of factual inaccuracy might be beside the point. A Moveable Feast, Hemingway’s memoir of his life in Paris, would remain a minor fictional classic even if it turned out to be an unreliable account of that phase of Hemmingway’s life. Rigoberta, though, does not run the risk of being confused with Hemingway.

Rather, the argument for teaching I, Rigoberta Menchu is based on the claim that, for all its literary flaws, the book is an accurate and authentic representation of the sufferings of a people, perhaps of all oppressed peoples. Rigoberta Menchu’s translator and literary collaborator, the French feminist Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, recognized this fact in her introduction to I, Rigoberta Menchu: “Her life story is an account of contemporary history. ... She speaks for all the Indians of the American continent. ... The voice of Rigoberta allows the defeated to speak. She is a privileged witness. ... Her story is overwhelming because what she has to say is simple and true.” By the same token, if what she has to say is neither accurate nor representative, there can be no possible case for teaching the book, unless one wants to include it in a survey of celebrated hoaxes.

As I pointed out in Illiberal Education, there were plenty of reasons to be suspicious from the outset of Rigoberta Menchu’s credibility as the spokesperson for oppressed indigenous peoples. She met her feminist translator in Paris not a venue to which many of the Third World’s poor routinely travel. Rigoberta’s rhetoric employs a socialist and Marxist vocabulary that does not sound typical of a Guatemalan peasant. These jarring elements in her story have now been accounted for. David Stoll’s study shows that Rigoberta’s life story was “drastically revised” to reflect the ideological perspective of a revolutionary left-wing organization she joined and on whose behalf she made the fateful tour of Europe that led to the publication of her book.

So what explains the continuing allegiance to her autobiography among Western academics? The answer is even if Rigoberta does not accurately reflect the experiences of oppressed people in Guatemala, she does reflect the political ideology of American professors who came of age in the 1960s. She embodies a projection of Western Marxist and feminist views onto South American Indian culture, which is manipulated and distorted to serve Western political objectives. Her radicalism provides Third World confirmation of Western progressive ideology. She is in fact a mouthpiece for a left-wing critique of the West that is all the more powerful because it seems to come from an “authentic” Third World source.

Rigoberta thus provides a model with which American minority and female students are meant to identify: They, too, are oppressed like her; they, too, can make victimology a basis for group solidarity. And if they spend their precious college years reading this stuff and thereby waste the opportunity to have a genuine liberal arts education? Well, that’s just too bad. For Rigoberta’s admirers to renounce her now would be to give up a standard-bearer of progressive grievance and alienation.

Rigoberta Menchu has all along been a willing and crafty accomplice in this cultural transaction. With extraordinary canniness, she presented herself in her autobiography as the consummate victim, a quadruple victim of oppression. She is a person of color, and thus a victim of racism. She is a woman, and thus a victim of sexism. She is a Latin American, and thus a victim of European and North American colonialism. She is an Indian, and thus victimized by the Latino ruling class of Latin America.

For such ingenuity in seizing the bottom rung of the ladder, who can doubt that Rigoberta Menchu deserved a prize?

[TenthAmendmentChampion]

Al Gore or the Unabomber Quiz

[Landru]

"This choice, more than any other Nobel Committee selection, marks the end of a 105-year era."

Amen.

Junk science begets.

...junk awards.

[CougarGA7]

If Alfred Nobel was alive today he wouldn’t have regretted inventing dynamite.

[TAdams8591]

What does Global Warming have to do with peace????