Nobel?

Donald Trump should not receive the Nobel Peace prize. But will he? The French have a beautiful expression, "voyons voir," which can be roughly translated as "let's wait and see what happens."

Four US presidents have already been awarded with the Nobel Peace Prize: Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Jimmy Carter (after leaving office), and Barack Obama in 2009 for his "extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between people." Now, this explanation was complete fakery, and it merely expressed the hope that Obama would act like that going forward.

As unbelievable as the proposal for Trump to get the Nobel Peace Prize is, we should nevertheless react to it in three ways.

First, we should bear in mind that the great compromise which enabled the breakthrough towards a peaceful resolution of the Korean crisis was made not by Trump but by Kim Jong-un. It was Kim who made the key concession, which means any prize should be directed to the pair jointly. And the weakness of this idea is obvious – it would invite ridicule to hand the Nobel Peace Prize to the head of arguably the most oppressive regime in the world.

Second, remember how, a little while ago, Trump was competing with Kim about the buttons to trigger nuclear missiles that they have at their disposal, with the American claiming his button is bigger than that of his counterpart in Pyongyang.

As such, the extreme oscillations in the public perception of the Korean crisis are significant. One week, we are told we are on a brink of nuclear war; then there is a week of respite, then the war threat explodes again.

Different vibes

When I visited Seoul in August 2017, my friends there told me there is no serious threat of a war because the North Korean regime knows it cannot survive it. Yet, the South Korean authorities have often prepared their population for a nuclear war.

And, lately, our media has reported on the more and more ridiculous exchange of insults between Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump. But the irony of the situation is that, when we get (what appears to be) two immature men letting go of their rage and hurling insults at each other, our only hope is that there is some anonymous and invisible institutional constraint preventing their rage to explode into a full-on war.

Usually, we tend to complain that in today's alienated and bureaucratized politics, institutional pressures and constraints prevent politicians from expressing their personal visions. But, in this case, we hope such constraints will prevent the expression of all too crazy personal visions.

Thus, should Donald and Kim really be rewarded just for performing a sudden U-turn and not acting as crazy as we feared?

Third, the unpleasant truth (for leftist liberals) is that, far from being just the bellicose crazy US leader, Trump hasn't turned out so bad in comparison with Hillary Clinton.

Indeed, asked by The Guardian whether she truly believes Clinton would be more dangerous than Trump, the actress Susan Sarandon responded: "I did think she was very, very dangerous. We would still be fracking, we would be at war [if she were president]. It wouldn't be much smoother.

"Look what happened under Obama that we didn't notice. She would've done it the way Obama did it, which was sneakily. He deported more people than have been deported now. How he got the Nobel Peace Prize, I don't know," she added.

Indeed, we should thus always bear in mind that, at his worst, Trump is mostly just continuing the politics of his predecessors.

Close shave

Who, then, really deserves the Nobel Peace Prize? Probably, those who, for sure, will never get it. Try to recall a frightening detail from the Cuban missile crisis: only later did we learn how close to nuclear war we were during a naval skirmish between an American destroyer and a Soviet B-59 submarine off Cuba on October 27, 1962.

The destroyer dropped depth charges near the submarine to try to force it to surface, not knowing it had a nuclear-tipped torpedo. Vadim Orlov, a member of the submarine crew, told the conference in Havana that the submarine was authorized to fire if three officers agreed. The officers began a fierce shouting debate over whether to sink the ship. Two of them said Yes and the other said No.

"A guy named Arkhipov saved the world," was a bitter comment of a historian on this accident.

Do we not all silently count on something similar in the heated exchange between the US and others – that, at a decisive moment, a single individual will find strength to cut short the mad circle of nuclear threats and counter-threats?

A similar act, much less known, was also committed in the Soviet Union in an even darker time. Sophia Karpai was the head of the cardiographic unit of the Kremlin Hospital in the late 1940s. Her (accidental) misfortune was that it was her job to take twice the electrocardiogram of Andrei Zhdanov, on July 25 1948 and on July 31, days before Zhdanov's death, due to heart failure.

The first ECG, taken after Zhdanov displayed some heart problems, was inconclusive (a heart attack could be neither confirmed nor excluded), while the second one surprisingly showed a much better picture (the intraventricular blockage disappeared, a clear indication that there was no heart attack).

Doctor's plot

In 1951, she was arrested on charges that alleged, in a conspiracy with other doctors treating Zhdanov, she falsified the data, erasing the clear indications that a heart attack did occur, thereby depriving Zhdanov of the special care needed by a victim of cardiac arrest. After harsh treatment, including a brutal beating, all the other accused doctors confessed. "Sophia Karpai, whom her boss doctor Vinogradov had described as nothing more than 'a typical person of the street with the morals of the petty bourgeoisie,' was kept in a refrigerated cell without sleep to compel a confession. However, she did not confess." (Jonathan Brent and Vladimir P. Naumov, Stalin's Last Crime, New York: HarperCollins 2003, p. 307) And the impact and significance of her perseverance cannot be overestimated: her signature would have dotted the 'i' on the prosecutor's case on the "doctor's plot," immediately setting in motion the mechanism that, once rolling, would lead to the death of hundreds of thousands, maybe even to a new European war (according to Stalin's plan, the "doctor's plot" should have demonstrated that the Western intelligence agencies tried to murder the top Soviet leaders, and thus served as an excuse to attack Western Europe).

She persisted just long enough for Stalin to enter his final coma, after which the entire case was immediately dismissed. And her simple heroism was crucial in the series of details which, "like grains of sand in the gears of the huge machine that had been set in motion, prevented another catastrophe in Soviet society and politics generally, and saved the lives of thousands, if not millions, of innocent people." (Op.cit., p. 297)

This simple persistence against all odds is ultimately the stuff true heroes are made of. We learn about such cases only sometimes and only years later. So, if there is to be a minimal justice in who gets the Nobel Peace Prize, it should be given neither to active politicians for their present acts (i.e., for just no being as brutal as one expected them to be) nor to politicians for their future expected acts; the prize should be given retroactively, to nameless heroes like Arkhipov and Karpai.

- Slavoj Zizek, "Should Donald Trump get the Nobel Peace Prize?"

Cratylus

SOCRATES: Then let us seek the true beauty: not asking whether a face is fair, or anything of that sort, for all such things appear to be in a flux; but let us ask whether the true beauty is not always beautiful.

CRATYLUS: Certainly.

SOCRATES: And can we rightly speak of a beauty which is always passing away, and is first this and then that; must not the same thing be born and retire and vanish while the word is in our mouths?

CRATYLUS: Undoubtedly.

SOCRATES: Then how can that be a real thing which is never in the same state? for obviously things which are the same cannot change while they remain the same; and if they are always the same and in the same state, and never depart from their original form, they can never change or be moved.

CRATYLUS: Certainly they cannot.

SOCRATES: Nor yet can they be known by any one; for at the moment that the observer approaches, then they become other and of another nature, so that you cannot get any further in knowing their nature or state, for you cannot know that which has no state.

CRATYLUS: True.

SOCRATES: Nor can we reasonably say, Cratylus, that there is knowledge at all, if everything is in a state of transition and there is nothing abiding; for knowledge too cannot continue to be knowledge unless continuing always to abide and exist. But if the very nature of knowledge changes, at the time when the change occurs there will be no knowledge; and if the transition is always going on, there will always be no knowledge, and, according to this view, there will be no one to know and nothing to be known: but if that which knows and that which is known exists ever, and the beautiful and the good and every other thing also exist, then I do not think that they can resemble a process or flux, as we were just now supposing. Whether there is this eternal nature in things, or whether the truth is what Heracleitus and his followers and many others say, is a question hard to determine; and no man of sense will like to put himself or the education of his mind in the power of names: neither will he so far trust names or the givers of names as to be confident in any knowledge which condemns himself and other existences to an unhealthy state of unreality; he will not believe that all things leak like a pot, or imagine that the world is a man who has a running at the nose. This may be true, Cratylus, but is also very likely to be untrue; and therefore I would not have you be too easily persuaded of it. Reflect well and like a man, and do not easily accept such a doctrine; for you are young and of an age to learn. And when you have found the truth, come and tell me.

CRATYLUS: I will do as you say, though I can assure you, Socrates, that I have been considering the matter already, and the result of a great deal of trouble and consideration is that I incline to Heracleitus.

SOCRATES: Then, another day, my friend, when you come back, you shall give me a lesson; but at present, go into the country, as you are intending, and Hermogenes shall set you on your way.

CRATYLUS: Very good, Socrates; I hope, however, that you will continue to think about these things yourself.

The Discourse that Ate Post-Modernism

We no longer ‘really believe’ religion but more of us follow its rituals than ever before because of ‘culture’. This obsession with culture and breaking of identities was foreseen in Marx’s texts

There is a delicious old Soviet joke about Radio Yerevan: a listener asks: “Is it true that Rabinovitch won a new car in the lottery?”, and the radio presenter answers: “In principle yes, it’s true, only it wasn’t a new car but an old bicycle, and he didn’t win it but it was stolen from him.”

Does exactly the same not hold for Marx’s legacy today? Let’s ask Radio Yerevan: “Is Marx’s theory still relevant today?” We can guess the answer: in principle yes, he describes wonderfully the mad dance of capitalist dynamics which only reached its peak today, more than a century and a half later, but… Gerald A Cohen enumerated the four features of the classic Marxist notion of the working class: (1) it constitutes the majority of society; (2) it produces the wealth of society; (3) it consists of the exploited members of society; and (4) its members are the needy people in society. When these four features are combined, they generate two further features: (5) the working class has nothing to lose from revolution; and (6) it can and will engage in a revolutionary transformation of society.

None of the first four features applies to today’s working class, which is why features (5) and (6) cannot be generated. Even if some of the features continue to apply to parts of today’s society, they are no longer united in a single agent: the needy people in society are no longer the workers, and so on.

But let’s dig into this question of relevance and appropriateness further. Not only is Marx’s critique of political economy and his outline of the capitalist dynamics still fully relevant, but one could even take a step further and claim that it is only today, with global capitalism, that it is fully relevant.

However, at the moment of triumph is one of defeat. After overcoming external obstacles the new threat comes from within. In other words, Marx was not simply wrong, he was often right – but more literally than he himself expected to be.

For example, Marx couldn’t have imagined that the capitalist dynamics of dissolving all particular identities would translate into ethnic identities as well. Today’s celebration of “minorities” and “marginals” is the predominant majority position – alt-rightists who complain about the terror of “political correctness” take advantage of this by presenting themselves as protectors of an endangered minority, attempting to mirror campaigns on the other side.

And then there’s the case of “commodity fetishism”. Recall the classic joke about a man who believes himself to be a grain of seed and is taken to a mental institution where the doctors do their best to finally convince him that he is not a grain but a man. When he is cured (convinced that he is not a grain of seed but a man) and allowed to leave the hospital, he immediately comes back trembling. There is a chicken outside the door and he is afraid that it will eat him.

“Dear fellow,” says his doctor, “you know very well that you are not a grain of seed but a man.”

“Of course I know that,” replies the patient, “but does the chicken know it?”

So how does this apply to the notion of commodity fetishism? Note the very beginning of the subchapter on commodity fetishism in Marx’s Das Kapital: “A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.”

Commodity fetishism (our belief that commodities are magic objects, endowed with an inherent metaphysical power) is not located in our mind, in the way we (mis)perceive reality, but in our social reality itself. We may know the truth, but we act as if we don’t know it – in our real life, we act like the chicken from the joke.

Niels Bohr, who already gave the right answer to Einstein’s “God doesn’t play dice“(“Don’t tell God what to do!”), also provided the perfect example of how a fetishist disavowal of belief works. Seeing a horseshoe on his door, a surprised visitor commented that he didn’t think Bohr believed superstitious ideas about horseshoes bringing good luck to people. Bohr snapped back: “I also do not believe in it; I have it there because I was told that it works whether one believes in it or not!”

This is how ideology works in our cynical era: we don’t have to believe in it. Nobody takes democracy or justice seriously, we are all aware of their corruption, but we practice them – in other words, we display our belief in them – because we assume they work even if we do not believe in them.

With regard to religion, we no longer “really believe”, we just follow (some of the) religious rituals and mores as part of the respect for the “lifestyle” of the community to which we belong (non-believing Jews obeying kosher rules “out of respect for tradition”, for example).

“I do not really believe in it, it is just part of my culture” seems to be the predominant mode of the displaced belief, characteristic of our times. “Culture” is the name for all those things we practice without really believing in them, without taking them quite seriously.

This is why we dismiss fundamentalist believers as “barbarians” or “primitive”, as anti-cultural, as a threat to culture – they dare to take seriously their beliefs. The cynical era in which we live would have no surprises for Marx.

Marx’s theories are thus not simply alive: Marx is a ghost who continues to haunt us – and the only way to keep him alive is to focus on those of his insights which are today more true than in his own time.

- Slavoj Zizek, "200 years later, we can say that Marx was very often right – but in a much more literal way than he intended"