Holy Crap! President Obama Wins Nobel Peace Prize

In a stunning announcement this morning, President Barack Obama was named the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize recipient. The response has been fast, loud, and all over the place. So what are we supposed to think?

It's clear that people - even those that really like President Obama - have mixed feelings. A Huffington Post poll asking people what they thought was relatively evenly split between him deserving the prize, not being sure if he deserved the prize, and thinking it was just too early. Watching Twitter and Facebook this morning, the volley of messages about the award has been huge.

One of the most frequent themes is the notion of intentions vs. results. A common snarky joke I've seen is "Hey, I'm trying to change the world too; can I be considered next year?" One of my former students at Northwestern University wrote "This is reminding me of my Ivan Illch - "To Hell With Good Intentions!""

One of the interesting things is that while we tend to think of the Nobel Prize as this beacon of recognized achievement, it is - like all awards - a subjective and political award that is not just reactive but proactive. Indeed, President Obama acknowledged as much when he said that: "I do not view it as a recognition of my own accomplishments, but rather as an affirmation of American leadership on behalf of aspirations held by people in all nations...throughout history, the Nobel Peace Prize has not just been used to honor specific achievement, it's also been used as a means to give momentum to a set of causes."

Some of the smartest commentary I've seen has pointed out that the Nobel Prize is not always an award for accomplishment. Just Foreign Policy executive director Robert Naiman points out that Desmond Tutu was awarded the prize in 1984, a full ten years before Apartheid officially ended, in large part to add the heft of the international community to his cause.

What should social entrepreneurs think about the award? It's important to look at the context and pattern of the laureates for the last two decades. It's only been quite recently that the notion of "peace" has expanded beyond very traditional actors in positions of political power to influence conflict resolution. Muhammad Yunus and Wangaari Maathai are probably the two best known social innovators to win the award, which I view as an expansion of the notion of "peace" to include the root causes of conflict - poverty, resource scarcity etc.

Mostly what I think is that this award is an affirmation of the common sense middle space that Obama occupied during the election and seems to embody for so many around the world. Robert Fuller, the former president of Oberlin College, labeled it "dignitarian politics" in which people want dignity more than anything else. For him, dignity means the ability to pursue a life unmolested.

A lack of dignity is at the core of the disempowerment that has sometimes been the byproduct of well-intentioned aid and philanthropy. A lack of dignity is the feeling that people have when they've been kicked down by the world and feel as though they're no longer in control of their ability to shape their future. There is little as crippling as a lack of dignity.

If President Obama, by example and deed, can usher a new era that places human dignity at the center of the political, social, and economic calculus, then this will have been a brilliant selection. If he can't, I hope he goes down trying.

(Photo: Huffington Post)