Obama’s Peace Prize win celebrates a return to compassion after the warmongering of the Bush years.

Like many others, I was initially skeptical about the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama. But the more I look at what he has done to promote disarmament and foster a welcome multilateralist approach to world affairs, the more I think it makes a great deal of sense.

Even the most casual glance at the span of human history reveals that our primate ingenuity has led us down an alarming path. Over thousands of years, warriors armed with reasonably clever weapons could kill one person at a time. It took a lot of work, and combatants understood the consequences of violence. If you thrust a sword into another soldier, you are intimately exposed to the reality of another human being’s suffering and death. Consequently, even large battles in the pre-modern era had relatively low casualty rates.

But since the invention of explosives and repeating weapons, the effect of military violence has become far more deadly; a single individual can easily kill not just hundreds of others with a machine gun for instance, but even thousands with large bombs. And those deaths have become much more palatable due to their remoteness. Even worse, the ratio of military vs. civilian casualties in times of war has over the course of the last 100 years or so become completely inverted. A war near your home is far likelier to kill you than a war in which you are an actual combatant.

We find ourselves at the beginning of the 21st century, armed to the teeth with a glittering array of weapons which, if deployed, will shred, burn, and poison the entire human race into extinction. Such a horror would not only mean the loss of individuals; it would mean the end of all the arts, sciences, and beliefs of humankind. Personally speaking, I find this the bleakest thought of all.

It is clear that, as technology progresses, it will become easier than ever for a single individual to cause mass death and destruction. If you think that’s a terrifying thought, imagine where we could be in 50 years from now, or in 100, or a thousand. Naturally, as we peer into the future, the question arises: Is the human race doomed? Are we so clever that one day we’ll invent a thing so dangerous and powerful that we’ll all go up in smoke?

While that remains a distinct possibility, we have another legacy from our primate ancestors; it is our innately social nature. Like our closest ape relatives, human beings are demonstrably empathic – we feel the happiness and pain of others. We also have an advantage over our animal cousins: we have advanced communication skills.

It is these qualities we need to save ourselves, and in effect, that is what the Nobel Peace Prize was designed to recognize. The qualifications for nomination include work done to reduce the number of standing armies (which in a modern context can be read as “disarmament”) and “for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” In plain language, promoting communication instead of conflict.

So I suspect the Nobel Prize committee was simply celebrating a return to dialogue after eight years of threats, human rights violations, and naked warmongering from the Bush/Cheney regime. Obama has cancelled the highly provocative missile shield directed ostensibly at Iran but actually meant to intimidate Russia, and offered actual diplomacy in its stead. He’s made it clear that he doesn’t regard the United Nations as a danger to American interests, but rather a forum with potential to make the world safer. He has done his best to take fear out of the international equation and replace it with rationality.

In essence, he has abandoned a culture of panic and attack for one of compassion and sanity. This is exactly the kind of legacy we want to leave our descendants. I would argue that this, more than anything else, makes him deserving of the prize.