We Americans love awards and award programs. We want to celebrate success in competition. We want to recognize and honor excellence. We have awards for almost everything. We have awards for entertainment such as the Emmys, the Oscars, the Golden Globe awards, the Grammys, the Country and Western Music awards and the daytime Emmys. For sports we not only have our championship games in football, baseball, hockey and basketball, but we have awards like Rookie of the Year, Most Valuable Player and the many Hall of Fame honors.
Americans, make up less than 5% of the world population, but earn many times their share of international awards as well. We earn the majority of Nobel Prizes and Pulitzer prizes in many categories like physics, economics, literature, peace and medicine.
Our prizewinners are then entitled to add the award to their name much like aristocratic titles of old and those still granted today in England. The person is introduced as Pulitzer Prize winner or Nobel Prize winner or Hall of Fame inductee or Oscar winner. The title gives the holder greater authority and usually a bigger future pay check in their field.
But these prizes are not without much controversy and disagreement.
In the field of sports awards, questions have arisen as to whether an athlete’s moral character should be a factor in the selection process. There are several recent examples. A man considered the best baseball player ever because he hit the most home runs in a single season and the most in a career while also winning many Golden Glove awards for fielding excellence and several season MVP awards and for making many All Star game appearances, had been accused of using performance enhancing drugs. Should he be eligible for the Baseball Hall of Fame? What about another who denied similar charges for years and finally admitted that he had lied repeatedly and had actually used the forbidden fruit? Should he ever be eligible since he too was a great player and a team leader? Then there was the man with the most base hits who lost his career for betting on baseball. Can he ever be forgiven and awarded for his performance?
In the entertainment industry, awards are even more in question. How does a movie get nominated for best picture but the director doesn’t get a mention? How do some movies or actors win when few believe that they were the best? Remember when “Chicago” won best picture? Remember when Halle Barry won Best Actress for that dreadful movie? And why do Meryl Streep and Helen Mirren seem to win so often just because they are by far the best two actresses in the world? Can’t we set quotas on how often one could be nominated or win this treasured award? Why doesn’t Maggie Smith win more awards? And why didn’t the Mentalist and Simon Baker get awards when their’s was one of the best American T.V. shows for many years?
The latest claim against the entertainment awards is that they do not go enough to people of different ethnic and racial populations. The feeling is that awards should be more proportional.
This disproportionality has also affected international awards like the Nobel and Pulitzer. Members of one religious/ethnic group which represents less than .2% of the world population has won more than half the awards since the end of World War II, while a religious group’s membership, accounting for almost a quarter of the world’s population, has won only three or four and one of those was a peace prize that went to a terrorist.
Time magazine also has an annual award - Person of the Year. The recent nominees have included some of the least likely people like a genocidal dictator, an alleged narcissistic traitor, and a woman who was able to avoid paying inheritance taxes on her wife’s multi-million dollar estate.
President Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize when he was first elected. Since then he has done everything possible to earn it retroactively. He got us out of Iraq and Afghanistan and kept us out of Libya, Egypt, Iran, Syria, and Ukraine. He has realized that regional countries and their organizations should deal with conflicts in their area. We and our troops will no longer be the 911 of the world. His next step should be to close many of our 700+ foreign military bases. But he would have done all this even without the Nobel prize.
We already have many ways of voting for our favorites.
In sports, we have the statistics which give an objective evaluation of the player’s greatness. In baseball we have batting averages and stats on the number of home runs hit, the number of runs batted in, the number of bases stolen, etc. We know who the best players are in every area. We also have objective statistics in football, basketball, hockey, etc. Our best athletes are known, clearly identified by accomplishments and are paid accordingly. We have athletes who make as much as $20 million a year, surely that is a reward and an award.
In other areas of entertainment we have other solid criteria and rewards to honor the best. The best actors get the best parts, generate some of the best box office receipts and most importantly are paid generously for their accomplishments.
In the case of awards for economics, literature, science and politics as we see in the Pulitzer and the Nobel prizes as well as dozens of lesser known ones, they are also very subjective while there are objective criteria that are recognized for these high achievers.
In economics there are clear winners who provide theories that greatly affect economic analysis. They are awarded high level positions in academia and the business sector that profit from the ideas and are awarded generous salaries. How many award winners in economics warned us about the crash of 2008? How many have come out with a simple and fair federal tax code?
One Nobel Prize winning economist supported the mistaken idea that the Occupy Wall Street people came up with that our problems are caused not by Wall Street but by the top 1%, making 99% of us innocent and helpless underdogs. So every household earning $400,000 or more is the enemy. This includes all successful actors, professional athletes, musicians, comedians, writers, educators, surgeons and economists. He didn’t realize that he himself was in the group. Or maybe he did.
(We are now being told by socialist Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders that the fault really lies with our top .0002%, our 536 billionaires. That would make 99.9998% of us helpless, economic and political victims - a nation of underdogs.)
In literature we have best-selling authors as well as those who produce great classics. Shakespeare never won a Pulitzer or Nobel prize, but we still know how great he was. The same with Salinger, Peter Beagle, John Barth, etc.
(Full disclosure: I did not get a Pulitzer for my novel, “Reflections of a Freelance Monk,” though it is considered by some the best example of its genre - the modern metaphysical murder mystery memoir appearing to be an unauthorized and unintentional autobiography. Had I won, I would have donated the prize money to organizations helping young, inner-city metaphysicians.)
In science we have great inventions and cures. The scientists who devise these breakthroughs are known, recognized and rewarded regardless of award ceremonies. Prize winning scientists get into trouble when they venture outside their very specific area of expertise.
One Nobel Prize winner recently made some absurd comments regarding working in a lab with women and was forced to resign his unpaid position in humiliation. Award winning physicists embarrass themselves when they venture into philosophy, especially metaphysics. Their genius is as limited as is their award specialty. They would be well advised to opine only in their very narrow area of expertise.
It seems that these many awards and award shows promote narcissism and controversy and emphasize the extrinsic rather than encourage excellence.
Could we ever live without these awards, bold symbols of our meritocracy? Could we establish people’s authority without knowing their provenance?
I think that it would be nice to try.
