Gonzaga Debate Institute 2010 Scholars Nuclear K’s

Kurasawa – Predictions

Acknowledging the dytopic future harms is a catalyst for political action

Kurasawa 4 (Fuyuki, Professor of Sociology – York University of Toronto, Constellations, 11(4)) jl

Returning to the point I made at the beginning of this paper, the significance of foresight is a direct outcome of the transition toward a dystopian imaginary (or what Sontag has called “the imagination of disaster”).11 Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, two groundbreaking dystopian novels of the first half of the twentieth century, remain as influential as ever in framing public discourse and understanding current techno-scientific dangers, while recent paradigmatic cultural artifacts – films like The Matrix and novels like Atwood’s Oryx and Crake – reflect and give shape to this catastrophic sensibility.12 And yet dystopianism need not imply despondency, paralysis, or fear. Quite the opposite, in fact, since the pervasiveness of a dystopian imaginary can help notions of historical contingency and fallibilism gain traction against their determinist and absolutist counterparts.13 Once we recognize that the future is uncertain and that any course of action produces both unintended and unexpected consequences, the responsibility to face up to potential disasters and intervene before they strike becomes compelling. From another angle, dystopianism lies at the core of politics in a global civil society where groups mobilize their own nightmare scenarios (‘Frankenfoods’ and a lifeless planet for environmentalists, totalitarian patriarchy of the sort depicted in Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale for Western feminism, McWorld and a global neoliberal oligarchy for the alternative globalization movement, etc.). Such scenarios can act as catalysts for public debate and socio-political action, spurring citizens’ involvement in the work of preventive foresight.

Kurasawa – Predictions

Repoliticization of futurism reclaims critical judgement over threats

Kurasawa 4 (Fuyuki, Professor of Sociology – York University of Toronto, Constellations, 11(4)) jl

On top of their dubious assessments of what is to come, alarmism and resignation would, if widely accepted, undermine a viable practice of farsightedness. Indeed, both of them encourage public disengagement from deliberation about scenarios for the future, a process that appears to be dangerous, pointless, or unnecessary. The resulting ‘depublicization’ of debate leaves dominant groups and institutions (the state, the market, techno-science) in charge of sorting out the future for the rest of us, thus effectively producing a heteronomous social order. How, then, can we support a democratic process of prevention from below? The answer, I think, lies in cultivating the public capacity for critical judgment and deliberation, so that participants in global civil society subject all claims about potential catastrophes to examination, evaluation, and contestation. Two normative concepts are particularly well suited to grounding these tasks: the precautionary principle and global justice.

Predictions don’t mean our impact aren’t true – determining relative risk allow us to make accurate predictions about the future

Kurasawa 4 (Fuyuki, Professor of Sociology – York University of Toronto, Constellations, 11(4)) jl

The evaluative framework proposed above should not be restricted to the critique of misappropriations of farsightedness, since it can equally support public deliberation with a reconstructive intent, that is, democratic discussion and debate about a future that human beings would freely self-determine. Inverting Foucault’s Nietzschean metaphor, we can think of genealogies of the future that could perform a farsighted mapping out of the possible ways of organizing social life. They are, in other words, interventions into the present intended to facilitate global civil society’s participation in shaping the field of possibilities of what is to come. Once competing dystopian visions are filtered out on the basis of their analytical credibility, ethical commitments, and political underpinnings and consequences, groups and individuals can assess the remaining legitimate catastrophic scenarios through the lens of genealogical mappings of the future. Hence, our first duty consists in addressing the present-day causes of eventual perils, ensuring that the paths we decide upon do not contract the range of options available for our posterity.42 Just as importantly, the practice of genealogically inspired farsightedness nurtures the project of an autonomous future, one that is socially self-instituting. In so doing, we can acknowledge that the future is a human creation instead of the product of metaphysical and extra-social forces (god, nature, destiny, etc.), and begin to reflect upon and deliberate about the kind of legacy we want to leave for those who will follow us. Participants in global civil society can then take – and in many instances have already taken – a further step by committing themselves to socio-political struggles forging a world order that, aside from not jeopardizing human and environmental survival, is designed to rectify the sources of transnational injustice that will continue to inflict needless suffering upon future generations if left unchallenged.

Kurasawa – Predictions

Refusal to engage in our predictions allows preventable impacts to materialize – we have an ethical responsibility to engage and adjudicate the consequences of our actions or inactions

Kurasawa 4 (Fuyuki, Professor of Sociology – York University of Toronto, Constellations, 11(4)) jl

In recent years, the rise of a dystopian imaginary has accompanied damning assessments and widespread recognition of the international community’s repeated failures to adequately intervene in a number of largely preventable disasters (from the genocides in the ex-Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and East Timor to climate change and the spiraling AIDS pandemics in parts of sub-Saharan Africa and Asia). Social movements, NGOs, diasporic groups, and concerned citizens are not mincing words in their criticisms of the United Nations system and its member-states, and thus beginning to shift the discursive and moral terrain in world affairs. As a result, the callousness implicit in disregarding the future has been exposed as a threat to the survival of humanity and its natural surroundings. The Realpolitik of national self-interest and the neoliberal logic of the market will undoubtedly continue to assert themselves, yet demands for farsightedness are increasingly reining them in. Though governments, multilateral institutions, and transnational corporations will probably never completely modify the presentist assumptions underlying their modes of operation, they are, at the very least, finding themselves compelled to account for egregious instances of short-sightedness and rhetorically commit themselves to taking corrective steps. What may seem like a modest development at first glance would have been unimaginable even a few decades ago, indicating the extent to which we have moved toward a culture of prevention. A new imperative has come into being, that of preventive foresight. Does this mean that we can expect all impending disasters to be comprehensively addressed before long? Apart from the unabashed assertion of national and commercial interests, at least two other structural factors make such an outcome unlikely within the existing world order. In the first place, because of the decentralized institutional design of global civil society, there exist few coordination mechanisms between its different participants and no single clearing-house for the collection and analysis of information about possible cataclysms – information that could then be transmitted to the general public, governments, or international organizations. Warnings may not always reach these addressees, or may get lost in the clamor of multiple campaigns and messages. The second problem is the asymmetry between the official and unofficial spheres of world politics. Despite mounting evidence that states and multilateral institutions are responding to preventive claims and requests, global civil society remains a weak public deprived of direct decision-making power. It has made important advances in gaining lobbying influence over and access to decision-making bodies, yet its main tool continues to be the mobilization of public opinion to pressure or convince these bodies to act. Until global civil society can convert itself into a strong public, it is not in a position to ensure the translation of demands for prevention from below into prevention from above. We should acknowledge that these two limits pose serious obstacles to a more muscular culture of prevention without meaningful institutional reforms of the global system. At the same time, and in lieu of a major overhaul of the regime of international governance, it would be a mistake to underestimate or simply dismiss the impact of the web of treaties, summits, judicial innovations, and grassroots ‘naming and shaming’ tactics and protest movements that have come to form, in recent years, a vast preventive infrastructure. I have argued that this dynamic is itself constitutive of global civil society and can thus best be appreciated when observed from below. Civic associations are engaging in dialogical, public, transnational struggles to avert catastrophe, cultivating a farsighted and dystopian flavored form of social action that is ethically and politically oriented toward the future. I further claimed that the work of preventive foresight is composed of three sets of practices striving to overcome difficulties constituent of the predicament of our times. Participants in global civil society are engaged in developing an early warning capacity about upcoming crises by collecting evidence, disseminating it, and laboring to have it publicly recognized. This sort of farsightedness responds to the contingent nature of the future without succumbing to the conviction that it is absolutely unknowable and indecipherable. Transnational associative groups are also nurturing intergenerational solidarity, a sense of care for those who will follow us. I suggested that, to adequately combat the presentist and shortsighted indifference toward the future that is typical in the contemporary world, a more explicitly farsighted cosmopolitanism needs to take root within global civil society. Normative thickening of this ideal could be accomplished via the long-term consequentialism of Jonas’s imperative of responsibility, a prospect whose basis we can already find in growing public appeals to the moral imagination and reason to activate our concern for later generations. Lastly, I contended that the work of preventive foresight can parry alarmist misappropriation or resignation by advocating a process of public deliberation that blends the principles of precaution and global justice. A farsighted politics can function through the public use of reason and the honing of the capacity for critical judgment, whereby citizens put themselves in a position to debate, evaluate, and challenge different dystopian narratives about the future and determine which ones are more analytically plausible, ethically desirable, and politically effective in bringing about a world order that is less perilous yet more just for our descendants. Many fora, ranging from local, face-to-face meetings to transnational, highly mediated discursive networks, are sowing the seeds of such a practice of participatory democracy. None of this is to disavow the international community’s rather patchy record of avoiding foreseeable calamities over the last decades, or to minimize the difficulties of implementing the kinds of global institutional reforms described above and the perils of historical contingency, presentist indifference toward the future, or alarmism and resignation. To my mind, however, this is all the more reason to pay attention to the work of preventive foresight in global civil society, through which civic associations can build up the latter’s coordination mechanisms and institutional leverage, cultivate and mobilize public opinion in distant parts of the world, and compel political leaders and national and transnational governance structures to implement certain policies.