For a democracy, we are strangely tolerant, and even enamored, of gratuitous invidious distinctions between people. I once had a fancy fellowship at a time when it was not open to women. A great fuss was made about this and the rules were changed, as they should have been. But I could never get worked up over the notion that excluding women was unfair, because the fellowship, like all such institutions, was unfair by its nature. It was restricted to men, it was restricted to citizens of certain countries, it was restricted to college graduates of a certain age. More fundamentally, it was restricted to the sort of people who win fellowships—smart, glib, capable of moderate-to-excessive obsequiousness. All these restrictions but the first remain. The founder of this fellowship, like John D. MacArthur, had made his money by exploiting the sort of people who don’t win fellowships. The only way to make the fellowship fair would be to dismantle it and give the money back, but I could never get my fellow fellows worked up over that notion. Thank goodness.
Prizes of this sort are considered part of the general incentive and reward structure that makes our society and our economy function. Perhaps some narrowly focused honors really do have this effect, operating on, say, artists or scientists like the profit motive on a business executive. But take something like the “Kennedy Center Honors,” created three years ago because, according to Kennedy Center chairman Roger Stevens, "We believe that there is a need in this country for national recognition of individuals who enrich our lives and our culture by their life work in the field of the performing arts.” A “need”? The first winners were Marian Anderson, Fred Astaire, George Balanchine, Richard Rodgers, and Artur Rubenstein. Have they really been underappreciated and underrewarded for their contributions to our cultural life? Is there another potentially great hoofer out there somewhere who has considered Fred Astaire’s career—the fame, the glamor, the money, the love of millions, the other awards—and who has decided it’s not worth it, until he reads that Fred has won the Kennedy Center Honors, and decides not to become a dentist after ail? That’s what you have to believe in order to suppose that giving Fred Astaire one more award serves any useful purpose.
Here’s another one. George F. Kennan recently was awarded the 1981 Albert Einstein Peace Prize. The prize, worth $50,000, was established two years ago by the Albert Einstein Peace Prize Foundation, presumably to encourage peace through the price mechanism. Would George Kennan be any less for peace without the prospect of $50,000 before his eyes? It is a libel even to suggest as much. Have George Kennan’s previous efforts for peace been thwarted by poverty and obscurity? It would be hard to say this of the winner of the Pulitzer Prize, sundry honorary degrees, the usual. Is anyone going to work harder for peace on the off chance that someone might give him $50,000? Unlikely. So what has the Albert Einstein Peace Prize done for peace?