Yes, I think the current spat over Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize is bunk-though perhaps not for the obvious reasons.
My interest here starts in the psychological: Why does this spat exist?
Let me put it a different way: The two most controversial Presidents elected during the past century are Obama and Kennedy. Both faced enormous issues. Kennedy was too young and too Catholic. Obama was too young and too black (also, as far as many were concerned, he might also be too Muslim). Yet both were elected. Why is this?
Well, according to most analysts, they were both elected because they both preached a common message: Hope. So from a psychological point of view this raises the question: does hope trump racism?
The answer—which explains a great deal about the current Nobel spat-is sometimes, if the neurochemistry is right.
What do we really mean by hope is the first question? The easiest way to answer this is to explain what happens when information arrives in the brain.
Your senses detect something, say a change in the environment (or Obama winning a prize), and quickly funnels this new data to the brain. The information's first stop is the amygdala-which NYU neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux accurately describes as the "hub of the wheel of fear."
The amygdala is the brain's early warning system, specializing in fear and rage, and for obvious survival reasons, prefers speed to accuracy. Simply put: any incoming information that could, perhaps, cause fear, usually does cause fear.
The data's next stop is the hippocampus, the homeland of memory and contextual learning. Think of it this way: the brain is a giant pattern recognition system and any hint of an alarm bell sends that whole system into action—essentially scouring the mnemonic database for solutions to problems (or responses to threats).
Meanwhile, contextual learning is what allows you to learn where and when something happened (like where and when you got stung by a bee) so the next time you're walking down by the brook, you don't get stung again.
The data's last stop is the cortex, where all this information is processed together and—if the threat isn't judged real—the all-clear signal can be sent out. Unfortunately, the system is designed for vigilance. So the all clear signal is weak. It's harder to turn off the stress system than to turn it on-the results being that it's very easy to feel anxious-to link anxiety to context-and a lot harder to feel calm (to get the brain to really believe that link is bunk).
So where does calm come from when it comes is the next question. How to keep a system designed to make you nervous from making you nervous all the time?
Well, if the mystics are to be believed, the answer lies in being unattached to outcome. If you are unattached to outcome then there can be no threat. The pattern recognition system doesn't even have to get all excited because anything it might link up to is already irrelevant. Do this for long enough, practice nonattachment (as the Buddhists say) and the brain's wiring rewires. The amygdala no longer sees novelty as reason for anxiety, the whole system gets derailed by neural-plasticity.
The psychologists (at least the positive psychologists) have found the same thing. If you maintain an optimistic outlook, then the system is going to be much less inclined to a view a change in the environment as a negative and thus you'll be less inclined to freak out about it.
So let's return to why Kennedy and Obama won their elections despite massive prejudice. Prejudice, as psychologists have long pointed out, is essentially our inborn xenophobia at work. Veldt living taught us to fear the other—with the other being anyone not in my immediate tribe. How we make those distinctions is simple-anyone who is not exactly like us is the other and we're designed to fear them.
But hope trumps this response time and again because hope is the ultimate all clear signal. Hope is optimism. When the pattern recognition system goes looking for a solution to the problem, hope is a way of giving it a solution even if one doesn't actually exist in the database. Hope, then, neutralizes the power of the hub of fear much in the same way as nonattachment—it alters the outcome ahead of time, it always puts the cart ahead of the horse.
So why did Obama win the Nobel Peace Prize? Has he done enough to deserve it? Well, he's done far less than some prior winners, and far more than a few others is the fair answer. But his advantage lies in his message—Obama appeal lies in his ability to transcend prejudice (of all sorts, including the international anti-American prejudice) with hope. He gives the world the feeling that there is nothing to fear, despite the fact that this is probably not the case.
So where does this anti-Obama Nobel spat emerge from? Well, if you look at the folks who have made the most outrageous arguments against him (and I'm going by the Huffington Post articles about this), it's dire conservatives like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh.
Many tend to write off these guys pretty quickly, but they connect with a lot of people and that connection is very befuddling to, say, liberals. Unless, that is, you consider things this way: people who hate Obama, hate him because (rightly or wrongly) when their pattern recognition system examines his decisions all it does is amplify the alarm bell for the simple reason that these folks aren't buying what he's selling. They don't hear hope in his message. They have wired up their brain in a different way and instead of hearing hope, they hear more reasons to get anxious.
My point is not that these conservatives aren't blowhards, it's that they don't actually think they're blowhards. Rather, they view themselves as Cassandras. Liberals (like myself) often think these guys are just shouting fire in a crowded movie theater for the ratings (what Historians of Nixon call "the politics of fear"), but the truth is they're shouting fire (and loudly) because they think that nobody's listening.
Their pattern recognitions systems are in overdrive, ringing alarm bells everywhere, certain that Obama winning the Nobel prize is another signal that we are heading straight to hell.
The spat over his award is bunk because it's not actually about whether or not Obama deserves the prize, it's because the question is being examined using faulty criteria. Because of the neurochemistry and neuroanatomy involved, most involved cannot access this victory with any objectivity.
In scientific terms: we are acting like this debate is taking place in the cortex (where thinking occurs) but it's really a fight that's happening in the amygdala and the hippocampus. This is really a battle between optimism and pessimism based on a bunch of criteria that has little to do with Obama and even less with world peace.
What we're really seeing is the triumph of a very old neurological system over almost everything we would consider the foundation of modern society (like, hmm, logic).
And that, my friends, is one peculiar pickle.
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