When it comes to prizes and awards, it is entirely possible that our European friends are making gentle fun of us Americans. How else to explain, for example, the Nobel Prize in Literature for Bob Dylan? Or the Charlemagne Prize awarded to Bill Clinton a few years ago?
Of course, we tend not to take awards and prizes very seriously here, especially in the arts or social sciences: They are usually emblems not of quality but popularity, and are often driven largely—sometimes exclusively—by politics. Take, for example, this year’s award of something called the Erasmus Prize to the American journalist-author Barbara Ehrenreich.
The Erasmus Prize, which comes with a €150,000 (about $187,000) honorarium, is the gift of a Dutch institution called the Praemium Erasmianum Foundation which, as its name suggests, exists solely to award an annual Erasmus Prize. Some flavor of the prize and its foundation may, perhaps, be gleaned from the fact that recent recipients include Jurgen Habermas, the German postmodern-Marxist philosopher, and the Wikimedia Foundation, of Julian Assange fame.
Ehrenreich, a polemicist who has successfully combined her lifelong socialism with a distinctly pathological view of American life, has been amply rewarded in the course of her long career with the many prizes, citations, honorary doctorates, and professional sinecures that tend to be showered upon writers of her faith. She should feel at home when the Praemium Erasmianum Foundation bestows its laurel (and check) in Amsterdam.
What mystifies us, however, is not so much the choice of Ehrenreich—or Wikimedia or Habermas—but the fact that such an award is named for Erasmus (1466-1536), the Dutch humanist and theologian best known for his Praise of Folly (1511). Indeed, it would be difficult to think of a writer or thinker less like Erasmus of Rotterdam than Barbara Ehrenreich of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America (2001) or Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream (2005).
Yes, the great reformer-philosopher had a satirical eye, and his critical writings surely contributed to the early spirit of the Reformation. Yet Erasmus is best known to posterity not for being a revolutionary but for not being a revolutionary: He was suspicious of the kind of ferment and fervor that could transmute reform into chaos, and remained a loyal Roman Catholic to the end of his life. He sought, as we would now say, change in the Church from within, not without; and he would have been genuinely horrified by the sneering and violently contemptuous tone directed toward American society that has earned Barbara Ehrenreich such accolades.
Still, at moments like this it is useful to stop and remind ourselves of the larger significance of such ribbons and medals as the Erasmus Prize—which is to say, none. Designed to recognize “exceptional contributions to the humanities, social science, [and] the arts,” the prize’s theme this year—”The Power of Investigative Journalism”—would appear to contradict its reason for being. Erasmus was many things, but investigative journalist was not among them.
Which, of course, gives this year’s citation a certain comic, as opposed to cosmic, significance: Barbara Ehrenreich, the Praemium Erasmianum Foundation declares, is “a major voice in the current debate surrounding the search for truth . . . uniting scientific analysis with literary elegance.”
Maybe her books sound better in Dutch.
