Column Volkskrant Tim Fransen, 19-1-2021

What judgment would hyper-intelligent and benign aliens make about us? Comedian and philosopher Tim Fransen views humanity through the lens of the Zorkians. This week: world peace.

Question: What do Mahatma Gandhi and Bradley Cooper have in common?
Answer: Both were nominated five times for the biggest prize in their field – the Nobel Peace Prize and the Oscar respectively – and just as often saw the win pass them by. (Okay, strictly speaking, Bradley Cooper only received four Oscar nominations, but the disregard for A Star Is Born is so outrageous, I’ll count it for two.)

On planet Zork they understand better than anyone else the importance of peace. Any civilization that has reached the technological stage where it can travel into space also has the technological ability to destroy itself. From that point on, fighting amongst each other is playing with fire. World peace is therefore an essential condition for a highly developed civilization. (In addition, the compassionate Zorkians also regard war as something repulsive and immoral. Hence the Zorkian saying, which ironically resembles an earthly statement, but is slightly different: “First comes peace, and then morality.”)

The Zorkians therefore consider it a mistake that Gandhi, one of the most peace-loving people in earth’s history, never received the Nobel Prize. The Zorkians are also raising their eyebrows (because they have them too, strangely enough) about the fact that Abiy Ahmed, the Prime Minister of Ethiopia, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019, only to plunge his country into civil war just a year later and is still allowed to keep the prize. Even (cyclist) Lance Armstrong had to hand in his medals when he turned out not to be such a deserving winner. The Zorkians can only draw one conclusion: “Those earthlings seem to take cycling more seriously than world peace.”

But the Zorkians are most surprised by the name that our most important peace prize bears, that of one Alfred Nobel: the inventor of dynamite and successful arms dealer, who owned more than ninety arms factories by the end of his life.

Yet Nobel certainly had noble intentions (no pun intended) when he stated in his will that a generous sum of money should be paid to ‘those who have provided the greatest benefit to humanity in the past year’. Alfred also did not see the awarding of a Nobel Peace Prize as ironic or contradictory, given the rest of his life’s work. In fact, in 1891 he wrote to the friendly Austrian Countess Bertha von Stuttner: ‘Perhaps my factories will put an end to war sooner than your congresses: on the day when two armies can wipe each other out in a second, all civilized countries will recoil from horror and disband their troops.’

Nobel was not the only Earthling who followed this paradoxical logic of peacemaking through weapons development. Around the same time, the Maxim machine gun was invented, which could fire six hundred rounds per minute. In 1897, The New York Times praised the machine gun for its “peace-bringing and peace-keeping horrors,” which “by its devastating effect has made countries and rulers think twice about the outcome of war.”

Anyway. Not long after, World War I broke out, the most devastating war to date. (I would have liked to have said something at the editorial meeting of The New York Times that week: “Um guys, maybe an idea to make a small correction?”) Yet this error of judgment should not dampen human optimism. Because the first bodies had not yet been laid out when we renamed the First World War ‘the war to end all war.’

Long story short: barely twenty years later, the Second World War broke out, making the First World War retroactively more like a bar fight that got out of hand. Humanity might have misjudged that a bit. But that can happen to the best of people. Moreover, we have had nuclear weapons ever since. So now the fun of war is really over.

Really.

When it comes to world peace, people seem to have little confidence in themselves. In any case, insofar as they pursue peace, they appear to have put their money on a rather risky strategy: expanding the arsenal of weapons by such terrible means that peace remains as the least dire option. The fact that this strategy has often backfired only seems to be a reason for people to go the extra mile: apparently the means were not terrible enough. Yet this peculiar peace strategy makes it easier for the Zorkians to understand why the fundamentally non-violent Gandhi was never allowed to receive the Nobel Prize. When people talk about ‘burying the hatchet’, what they mainly seem to mean is that much more effective weapons have now been invented to destroy the other side. You can safely bury that ax.

That leaves the Zorkians with just one question: “What is wrong with those people that Bradley Cooper never won an Oscar?!”