Gonzaga Debate Institute 2010 Scholars Nuclear K’s

Blight – Pragmatism/Policy Making

Pragamatic policy making is crucial
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)

Based on these considerations, Earle is emboldened by the end of the article to "set forth an alternative framework within which international relations could be conducted" (Earle, 1986, p. 374). By refusing to begin where the policymakers must begin, by beginning instead with the world of his undergraduate students and informed by some introductory psychology, Earle has decided to reinvent international relations. As a purely theoretical enterprise, this is unobjectionable. However, if he believes that this ought to be the prerequisite to reducing the risk of nuclear war, how long does he believe it will take to reinvent the wheel with which leaders drive international politics? If the answer is the correct one--forever!--what has happened to the memory of the fear that drove us all as psychologists to work in this area in the first place? It seems to have been conveniently and irresponsibly forgotten.

Nuclear policy making is key to avoid nuclear holocaust
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)

This, finally, ought to be the goal of all psychologists who recall, or who can be encouraged to recall, why they began to look into nuclear questions: policy-relevant knowledge. Optimism without the knowledge that justifies it is irresponsible. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran theologian hanged by the Nazis, once said that theology, if it is to live significantly, must first die formally, so that it can enter the world that needs it so desperately. The same is true for psychology now. If it is to have any impact on the risk of nuclear war, psychology as such must die, and psychologists must enter as best they can into the stream of life as it is known to nuclear policymakers. In so doing, the discipline of psychology is unlikely to get any credit for helping out, but its practitioners, a kind of invisible college of people devoted to what James called the science of mental life, will have acted responsibly. They will have remembered why they are doing what they are doing--because, at some moment, the world as we know it could be destroyed in a nuclear holocaust

A2: Militarism Bad

Arms control should be militarized to ensure safe denuclearization
LARSEN 2 (Jeffrey senior policy analyst with Science Applications International Corporation in Colorado Springs in Arms Control ed. Jeffrey Larsen p. 6-7 http://www.rienner.com/uploads/47d6f750a53eb.pdf TBC 6/30/10)

First, arms control was conceived as a way to enhance national security. As Hedley Bull explained: “arms control or disarmament was not an end in itself but a means to an end and that end was first and foremost the enhancement of security, especially security against nuclear war.”17 Or as Schelling and Halperin stated near the end of their book: “the aims of arms control and the aims of a national military strategy should be substantially the same.”18 This principle established national security as the dominant goal of arms control, not the reduction of arms per se. In fact it was understood that not all reductions were necessarily useful. There was an explicit recognition that arms control could be harmful if not properly guided by overall national security strategy. Second, the superpowers shared a common interest in avoiding nuclear war; this common interest could and should be the basis for effective arms control agreements. According to Bull, “The fact that the United States and the Soviet Union were locked in a political and ideological conflict, one moreover that sometimes took a military form, did not mean that they could not recognize common interests in avoiding a ruinous nuclear war, or cooperate to advance these common interests.”19 This assumption was one of the most important and controversial conceptual departures from past thinking promulgated by the new arms control theory. Previously, it was assumed that relaxation of political tensions had to precede the achievement of substantive arms control agreements. The founders of traditional arms control theory, in contrast, believed that the threat of global nuclear annihilation was so paramount that it transcended political and ideological differences. It was not necessary to fully resolve political conflicts before proceeding to negotiate arms control agreements; solutions to both could be advanced simultaneously. Third, arms control and military strategy should work together to promote national security. The unity of strategy and arms control was a central tenet of traditional arms control theory. Such unity was essential if arms control and defense policy were to avoid working at cross-purposes. For example, if the implementation of U.S. defense strategy required deploying certain types of weapons that were restricted by arms control agreements, this could defeat the overall purpose of our national security posture and erode the legitimacy of both the arms control process and U.S. defense policy.

Alt Fails – McClean

Abstract philosophizing kills alt solvency – it fails at policy prescription
McClean 1 (David E., “The Cultural Left and the Limits of Social Hope,” Am. Phil. Conf., www.americanphilosophy .org/archives/ past_conference_programs/pc2001/Discussion%20papers/david_mcclean.htm TBC 6/29/10)

Yet for some reason, at least partially explicated in Richard Rorty's Achieving Our Country, a book that I think is long overdue, leftist critics continue to cite and refer to the eccentric and often a priori ruminations of people like those just mentioned, and a litany of others including Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard, Jameson, and Lacan, who are to me hugely more irrelevant than Habermas in their narrative attempts to suggest policy prescriptions (when they actually do suggest them) aimed at curing the ills of homelessness, poverty, market greed, national belligerence and racism. I would like to suggest that it is time for American social critics who are enamored with this group, those who actually want to be relevant, to recognize that they have a disease, and a disease regarding which I myself must remember to stay faithful to my own twelve step program of recovery. The disease is the need for elaborate theoretical "remedies" wrapped in neological and multi-syllabic jargon. These elaborate theoretical remedies are more "interesting," to be sure, than the pragmatically settled questions about what shape democracy should take in various contexts, or whether private property should be protected by the state, or regarding our basic human nature (described, if not defined (heaven forbid!), in such statements as "We don't like to starve" and "We like to speak our minds without fear of death" and "We like to keep our children safe from poverty"). As Rorty puts it, "When one of today's academic leftists says that some topic has been 'inadequately theorized,' you can be pretty certain that he or she is going to drag in either philosophy of language, or Lacanian psychoanalysis, or some neo-Marxist version of economic determinism. . . . These futile attempts to philosophize one's way into political relevance are a symptom of what happens when a Left retreats from activism and adopts a spectatorial approach to the problems of its country. Disengagement from practice produces theoretical hallucinations"(italics mine).(1) Or as John Dewey put it in his The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy, "I believe that philosophy in America will be lost between chewing a historical cud long since reduced to woody fiber, or an apologetics for lost causes, . . . . or a scholastic, schematic formalism, unless it can somehow bring to consciousness America's own needs and its own implicit principle of successful action." Those who suffer or have suffered from this disease Rorty refers to as the Cultural Left, which left is juxtaposed to the Political Left that Rorty prefers and prefers for good reason. Another attribute of the Cultural Left is that its members fancy themselves pure culture critics who view the successes of America and the West, rather than some of the barbarous methods for achieving those successes, as mostly evil, and who view anything like national pride as equally evil even when that pride is tempered with the knowledge and admission of the nation's shortcomings. In other words, the Cultural Left, in this country, too often dismiss American society as beyond reform and redemption. And Rorty correctly argues that this is a disastrous conclusion, i.e. disastrous for the Cultural Left. I think it may also be disastrous for our social hopes, as I will explain. Leftist American culture critics might put their considerable talents to better use if they bury some of their cynicism about America's social and political prospects and help forge public and political possibilities in a spirit of determination to, indeed, achieve our country - the country of Jefferson and King; the country of John Dewey and Malcom X; the country of Franklin Roosevelt and Bayard Rustin, and of the later George Wallace and the later Barry Goldwater. To invoke the words of King, and with reference to the American society, the time is always ripe to seize the opportunity to help create the "beloved community," one woven with the thread of agape into a conceptually single yet diverse tapestry that shoots for nothing less than a true intra-American cosmopolitan ethos, one wherein both same sex unions and faith-based initiatives will be able to be part of the same social reality, one wherein business interests and the university are not seen as belonging to two separate galaxies but as part of the same answer to the threat of social and ethical nihilism. We who fancy ourselves philosophers would do well to create from within ourselves and from within our ranks a new kind of public intellectual who has both a hungry theoretical mind and who is yet capable of seeing the need to move past high theory to other important questions that are less bedazzling and "interesting" but more important to the prospect of our flourishing - questions such as "How is it possible to develop a citizenry that cherishes a certain hexis, one which prizes the character of the Samaritan on the road to Jericho almost more than any other?" or "How can we square the political dogma that undergirds the fantasy of a missile defense system with the need to treat America as but one member in a community of nations under a "law of peoples?" The new public philosopher might seek to understand labor law and military and trade theory and doctrine as much as theories of surplus value; the logic of international markets and trade agreements as much as critiques of commodification, and the politics of complexity as much as the politics of power (all of which can still be done from our arm chairs.) This means going down deep into the guts of our quotidian social institutions, into the grimy pragmatic details where intellectuals are loathe to dwell but where the officers and bureaucrats of those institutions take difficult and often unpleasant, imperfect decisions that affect other peoples' lives, and it means making honest attempts to truly understand how those institutions actually function in the actual world before howling for their overthrow commences. This might help keep us from being slapped down in debates by true policy pros who actually know what they are talking about but who lack awareness of the dogmatic assumptions from which they proceed, and who have not yet found a good reason to listen to jargon-riddled lectures from philosophers and culture critics with their snobish disrespect for the so-called "managerial class."