On Status

One of my favorite thinkers, Tyler Cowen, emphasizes the importance of status in how we view other people, and how we view ourselves. He comes at ideas from so many different angles, many of which are non-conventional, that I typically enjoy his writing immensely. But when it comes to a subject such as the Nobel Prize, he adopts a serious tone, and approaches the award as if it as a crucial mechanism for determining merit and status in his field. I don’t get it.

It’s nice to receive accolades and awards, but to me, the receipt of any award is so circumstantial and dependent upon the whims and biases of those who bestow the awards, that it’s hard to take them as anything but the recognition that a certain cadre of experts or individuals have found your work to be worthy of merit. It reminds me of Wittgenstein’s ruler: Unless you have confidence in the ruler's reliability, if you use a ruler to measure a table you may also be using the table to measure the ruler. And so it is with any subjective group of people who get together to decide the best art, the most peaceful, the most intelligent. Whoever they decide to honor says more about them than it does about who is truly the best in their field. Just as an LSAT, IQ test, trivia competition, and spelling bee will yield different results in gauging who is the most intelligent, so do the Academy of Arts and Sciences, MetaCritic, and the voting public.

It’s not worth asking, which of these groups is most capable of determining who is best? The better question is to analyze the group’s criteria in making the decision. That’s not to say that Nelson Mandela isn’t worthy of an international prize to reward those who promote peace (ahem, Henry Kissinger) or that Paul Krugman isn’t a truly elite economist. They are independently of what the Swedish elite decide.

I happen to think that Kurt Vonnegut was among the best writers of the last century, and that an author such as Saul Bellow couldn’t hold his jockstrap. But Vonnegut never won the prize. It’s obvious that the Nobel Prize committee values flowery prose over the straightforward. So it goes. Kurt Vonnegut’s insights into life and how we interact with each other are far more valuable than Bellow’s (It’s unfair of me to harp on Bellow. I actually like his writing overall – I just think he’s no Kurt Vonnegut). There are those who will always consider Bellow to be a superior writer because the Swedish fucking say so. And that makes me want to scratch out my eyeballs with a guitar pick.