Gonzaga Debate Institute 2010 Scholars Nuclear K’s

Kurasawa – Predictions

While seeking to prevent cataclysms from worsening or, better yet, from occurring in the first place, these sorts of initiatives can and must remain consistent with a vision of a just world order. Furthermore, the labor of farsightedness supports an autonomous view of the future, according to which we are the creators of the field of possibilities within which our successors will dwell. The current socio-political order, with all its short-term biases, is neither natural nor necessary. Accordingly, informed public participation in deliberative processes makes a socially self-instituting future possible, through the involvement of groups and individuals active in domestic and supranational public spaces; prevention is a public practice, and a public responsibility. To believe otherwise is, I would argue, to leave the path clear for a series of alternatives that heteronomously compromise the well-being of those who will come after us. We would thereby effectively abandon the future to the vagaries of history (‘let it unfold as it may’), the technocratic or instrumental will of official institutions (‘let others decide for us’), or to gambles about the time-lags of risks (‘let our progeny deal with their realization’). But, as I have tried to show here, this will not and cannot be accepted. Engaging in autonomous preventive struggles, then, remains our best hope. A farsighted cosmopolitanism that aims to avert crises while working toward the realization of precaution and global justice represents a compelling ethico-political project, for we will not inherit a better future. It must be made, starting with us, in the here and now.

Blight – Pragmatism/Policy Making

Neg authors fail, No alt solvency without convincing policy arguments
Blight 88 (James G. Must the Psychology of Avoiding Nuclear War Remain Free and Insignificant? Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University TBC 7/2/10)

Psychologists concerned with involving themselves professionally in reducing the risk of nuclear war continue, with only a few exceptions, to live and work in a dream world, a fantasy-land, within which they continue to tell themselves that they are doing just fine, that policymakers are indeed listening, or that, even if they are not, it is simply the bad fortune of nuclear policy types to continue to ignore so much good psychological advice, or that, at the least, psychologists should never give in to the nihilistic pessimism of one such as myself, who seems to have returned from a sojourn in policy-land brainwashed by his new colleagues--the inventors and purveyors of the nuclear arms race. This seems to me to be the gist of the responses to my piece in the January 1987 American Psychologist (AP): Whatever we as psychologists are doing that we believe may help reduce the risk of nuclear war, we should just keep doing it as best we can. We should not listen to Blight. I can vouch for the representativeness of the responses AP has seen fit to print. Since I began writing and speaking on the policy irrelevance of nuclear psychology about a year ago, I have received dozens of letters and phone calls and verbal rejoinders. The main message of these has been: Leave us alone. Let us be, in our cozy world composed exclusively of psychologists. Go back to your foreign policy think tank; turn in your psychological credentials; and stop trying to tell us how to go about our business. I have gotten the message. Except for a few more exchanges like this one, I am finished trying to tell the psychologists of Newcastle that few, if any, in the greater world are interested in buying their coal. I reiterate: There have been some notable exceptions to this rule, but very nearly all psychologists with whom I have had contact about policy relevance and nuclear war have urged me in no uncertain terms to beat it.
Perm Solves – policy relevance is key
Blight 88 (James G. Must the Psychology of Avoiding Nuclear War Remain Free and Insignificant? Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University TBC 7/2/10)

The central collective act for which psychologists must answer is their irresponsible failure to remember what is at stake, and to keep that problem primarily in front of their minds, rather than their supposed responsibilities to psychology as such. Milan Kundera has said all this much better than I. Kundera, a Czech emigre living in Paris, has tried to remind us of the truth and profundity of what I call "Kundera's Law": That in order to affect the world of affairs one must have a thickly textured, hands on, complexly informed view of the situation. If one does, then one may call oneself a realist. The alternative is to stand aside from the complex crawl of daily life as it occurs, to spout solutions to whatever problem interests one, and to meet no need greater than one's need to appear brilliant. Kundera wanted us never to forget--indeed, he warned us that it is truly irresponsible to forget--what life was like in his native land before the Nazis overran it, before the Soviets made it a part of their captive Central European Empire. Where Kundera wrote "burden," psychologists ought to read "policy relevance," which, in turn, is (or was) required by the sense of great nuclear danger. According to Kundera, The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But... the heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become . . . . The absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth, and become only half-real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. (Kundera, 1985, p. 5) He then posed the pivotal question: "What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?" (Kundera, 1985, p. 5). I contend that psychologists have chosen lightness, that they would rather be free to proffer ingenious psychological solutions to problems of nuclear risks, rather than to remember why they got into this stuff in the first place, and what that implies for speaking plainly, and with effect, to the people who manage the risks. The burden seems to have been too heavy for most psychologists to bear.