Reformism Good
Notes
This file is useful against teams who say1) The state is bad
2) Micropolitical alternatives/individual resistance/rethinking god
This is a generic set of cards that are useful for answering K affs as well as defending framework on the
neg. Additionally, these are useful on the aff at answering the K. The general cards at the bottom are
useful against any K.
Useful K Answers
The New Util Card
Even a small risk of nuclear war isn’t worth taking – preventing existential risk
Baum, Global Catastrophic Risk Institute executive director, 3-14-15
[Seth, Blue Marble Space Institute of Science researcher, Columbia University Center for Research on
Environmental Decisions affiliate researcher, Pennsylvania State University Geography PhD,
Contemporary Security Policy 36(1), “Winter-Safe Deterrence: The Risk of Nuclear Winter and Its
Challenge to Deterrence” http://sethbaum.com/ac/2015_Deterrence.pdf, p.3-5, accessed 4-19-15, TAP]
The concept of nuclear winter was first developed in the early 1980s by scientists including Paul Crutzen, who later won a Nobel Prize in
Chemistry for his work on the ozone hole, and legendary astronomer Carl Sagan.3 Sagan
went to great lengths to raise
awareness about nuclear winter in the 1980s and early 1990s.4 This episode apparently had some influence on policy, with
Mikhail Gorbachev citing it as a factor in his desire to cool that era’s nuclear tensions and reverse the arms race.5 After fading from the
spotlight, nuclear winter began a bit of a comeback in 2007 with the publication of new research
examining nuclear winter with the latest scientific models.6 Several follow-up studies and commentaries
have been published since, and research is ongoing.7 In technical terms, ‘nuclear winter’ refers specifically to a
cooling of Earth’s surface such that winter-like temperatures occur during summer, as caused by a
sufficiently large nuclear war. Cooling to warmer-than-winter temperatures can be called ‘nuclear autumn’. Per this definition,
nuclear winter/autumn is part of a broader suite of environmental consequences of nuclear war. However,
all of the environmental consequences can have profound consequences for the planet and for human
civilization, and likewise are important for policy. No separate term has been coined for the full suite of environmental consequences of
nuclear war, so this paper will use ‘nuclear winter’ as shorthand for the full suite. This use of ‘nuclear winter’ may be interpreted metaphorically:
a time of cold, darkness, and death. Nuclear
winter is caused by the burning of cities, industrial facilities, trees, and
other flammable materials, which sends smoke into the atmosphere. The main effects of the smoke derive
from the fact that the smoke rises high up into the atmosphere, past the clouds, into the stratosphere where
it will not quickly fall back out in rain. At this altitude, the smoke spreads across the planet and gradually
falls back out over the next ten to twenty years. While it is aloft, the smoke absorbs incoming sunlight and
blocks it from reaching the surface. As the smoke absorbs sunlight, the stratosphere warms, causing ozone
depletion at a potentially massive scale.8 The ozone depletion causes more ultraviolet radiation to reach
Earth’s surface. Increased UV radiation can harm living organisms, including humans. Harmful effects include skin
cancer and eye damage to animals and the inhibition of photosynthesis in plants.9 Meanwhile, the smoke blocking sunlight from
reaching the surface causes colder surface temperatures and less precipitation. Precipitation declines
because there is less heat to power the hydrological cycle. The main harmful effect that has been
identified is a decline in plant growth, including agricultural production. Secondary effects could include
disease outbreaks and additional conflicts.10 The effects occur worldwide, regardless of where the
detonations occur, though detonation location can affect the spatial distribution of impacts. For both UV radiation and cooling, the
magnitude of the disruption is proportionate to the amount of smoke put into the atmosphere, which in turn depends on the number of nuclear
detonations, the bombs’ yields, the detonation locations, and other factors. Regarding detonation location, a key variable is whether the
detonation occurs in a city, and if it does, the population density of the city. Other locations such as industrial zones can also produce significant
quantities of smoke. This is why nuclear
weapons testing has not caused nuclear winter: The tests were conducted
in remote locations or at high altitude, and thus did not have much to burn. The location of a city on the
globe can also make a difference given Earth’s topography and atmospheric circulation patterns, but this
effect is smaller. The most heavily studied nuclear winter scenario involves war between India and
Pakistan in which each country uses 50 nuclear weapons, each with a 15 kiloton yield, comparable to the Little Boy weapon
dropped on Hiroshima. The studies assume that the weapons are dropped on each country’s major cities, and not on e.g. remote military targets,
producing 5 teragrams of smoke.11 In this scenario, ozone loss would range from 20% to 70% from low to high
latitudes.12 Temperatures would fall about 1.25ºC within the first year. Even ten years after, temperatures would still be about 0.5ºC below
normal.13 Crop
yields in China and the Midwestern United States are projected to decline by around 1030%.14 One analysis estimates that at least two billion people would be at risk of starvation.15 A core point is
even a ‘limited’ regional nuclear war could have catastrophic global consequences. It should be
emphasized that what drives nuclear winter is the quantity of smoke entering the stratosphere, not where
the nuclear war occurs. Thus a comparably large nuclear war between other countries would have similar
global climatic and humanitarian effects. The India-Pakistan scenario offers an illustrative and relatively probable case, but any
nuclear weapon state except North Korea could produce similar effects. A larger nuclear exchange involving American and
Russian arsenals would cause further disruption. An exchange of about 1200 weapons could produce
about 50 teragrams of smoke, causing temperatures to fall by about 4ºC. For 4000 weapons—around what New
START prescribes—there could be 150 teragrams of smoke, with a temperature fall of about 8ºC. Agriculture
failure would be so severe and widespread that it becomes easier to count the survivors than the
fatalities.16 Climate scientist Alan Robock, who has led many of the recent nuclear winter studies, expects some
survivors ‘especially in Australia and New Zealand’.17 While this is hardly a cheerful evaluation, even this may be too
optimistic. Hopefully some people somewhere would find some way to survive. But the conditions
would be harsh enough that survival is no guarantee .18 Finally, it should be acknowledged that, over the years, there
has been some scepticism of whether nuclear winter would actually occur, or would occur with enough severity to be
that
worth factoring into security policy.19 To an extent, one cannot be sure what would happen, because a large exchange of nuclear weapons has
fortunately never occurred. However, there
are at least two reasons to believe that the current round of nuclear
winter science is yielding results that are at least in the general vicinity of what would actually happen.
One reason is that the science uses modern climate models developed for the study of global warming.
Global warming has its own sceptics and controversies, which has led to the climate models being heavily scrutinized.20 Climate science
may well be the most carefully vetted of all the sciences. The nuclear winter researchers are
themselves distinguished climate scientists and are using state-of-the-art climate models. And two
distinct nuclear winter research groups from two different countries using two different sets of models
both report approximately the same results.21 While some uncertainties in the science of nuclear winter remain and additional
research could provide additional confidence, it should be expected that the current research results are basically
sound. The second reason for believing that nuclear winter would occur is that it has a historical precedent
in volcano eruptions. Volcano eruptions, like nuclear weapon detonations, cause large amounts of smoke
to rise into the atmosphere. An insightful example is the 1815 Mount Tambora eruption. The Tambora eruption caused
temperatures to fall by about 0.5ºC, resulting in major food shortages and other disruptions, such that 1816 is now known as the ‘Year
Without Summer’.22 While humanity ultimately survived Tambora, nuclear war could put even more
smoke into the atmosphere and cause more severe disruption. It thus is important to factor into nuclear security policy.
Risk Analysis of Winter-Safe Nuclear Arsenal Limits It is in every country’s interest to avoid nuclear winter. No country would benefit from the
increased exposure to UV radiation and decreased agricultural yields, among other harms, all of which would occur worldwide regardless of
where the weapons were used. This point raises two questions: what is needed to avoid nuclear winter, and how far countries should go to avoid
it. Answering both questions suggests adhering to limits to nuclear weapon arsenal sizes that keep the world safe from nuclear winter. Given
uncertainty about both what future wars may occur and the severity of nuclear winter if nuclear war does occur, answering these questions
benefits from analysis to identify policies that perform well in light of the uncertainty. The
severity of nuclear winter is a function
of the amount of smoke produced in a nuclear exchange, which in turn depends on the number, yield, and
location of detonations in the exchange. How small of a nuclear arsenal would be needed to keep human civilization safe from nuclear
winter? The short answer is, nobody knows. Modern climate modelling provides a pretty good understanding of the climatic consequences. There
are some important uncertainties in the climate science, but the big uncertainty is how well humans will cope. Research on the allimportant
human factor is frighteningly scarce, limited mainly to a few studies connecting the climate science to agricultural models.23 This research is
instructive, but it leaves basic questions unanswered about the total human impacts of nuclear winter. Consider one
of the most detailed
studies of the human consequences of nuclear winter, by Ira Helfand of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War.24 This
is the study that found at least two billion at risk of starvation from an India-Pakistan exchange of 100 nuclear
weapons (50 per country). The two billion estimate comes from converting agriculture declines into nutrition loss for the people who
are already malnourished. As the study notes, the figure does not estimate deaths from second-order effects like
disease outbreaks and additional conflicts. Perhaps a mild nuclear winter could even trigger a conflict in
which additional nuclear weapons are built and used. The stakes may be even higher in the future as
developments in synthetic biology, geoengineering, and other technologies render civilization more
powerful but less stable.25 The bottom line is that even a smaller nuclear exchange might have
catastrophic global consequences . But on the other hand, it might not. Nobody knows. Making policy under such
heavy uncertainty is a difficult challenge, but it is also a familiar one. One cannot predict the
consequences of a military campaign, but decisions on whether and how to wage it must be made. One
cannot predict the consequences of a new technology, but decisions about whether and how to regulate it must be made. And so on for quite a
large portion of ongoing policy decisions. Here
it is important to bring in the ethics of global catastrophic risk. A
global catastrophe is an event that causes great harm to the entirety of global human civilization.
Catastrophes of this magnitude take on a special ethical significance. Carl Sagan was perhaps the first to
recognize this in his own discussion of nuclear winter. The astronomer saw the big picture: Human extinction
means the loss of all people who could ever exist into the distant future.26 Contemporary scholars
further understand that even without total human extinction, a permanent collapse of human civilization is
of comparable significance.27 Ultimately what is at stake is the long-term trajectory of human
civilization, its success or its failure.
Frontline – State Heuristic Good
Our heuristic means we learn about the State without being it. It won’t entrench
dominant norms BUT WE ALSO don’t’ invert the error and NEVER learn about
them. Our framework teaches contingent, but engaged, middle grounds. No State
pessimism bias or optimism bias for extreme Alts.
-we are defending a contingent state that does not exist now but we can bring it about
-Learning about the state good
-We don’t have to say the state is always good. Our model gives us another tool to combat pressing issues
Zanotti ‘14
Dr. Laura Zanotti is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Virginia Tech. Her research and teaching include critical
political theory as well as international organizations, UN peacekeeping, democratization and the role of NGOs in post-conflict
governance.“Governmentality, Ontology, Methodology: Re-thinking Political Agency in the Global World” – Alternatives:
Global, Local, Political – vol 38(4):p. 288-304,. A little unclear if this is late 2013 or early 2014 – The Stated “Version of
Record” is Feb 20, 2014, but was originally published online on December 30th, 2013. Obtained via Sage Database.
By questioning substantialist representations of power and subjects, inquiries on the possibilities of political agency are reframed in a way that focuses on power and subjects’ relational character and the contingent processes of their
(trans)formation in the context of agonic relations.
Options for resistance to governmental scripts are not limited to ‘‘rejection,’’ ‘‘revolution,’’ or
‘‘dispossession’’ to regain a pristine ‘‘freedom from all constraints’’ or an immanent ideal social order.
It is found instead in multifarious and contingent
struggles that are
within
government rationalities and at the same time
exceed and transform them This approach questions oversimplifications of complex
constituted
the scripts of
al
.
the
ities of liberal
political rationalities and of their interactions with non-liberal political players and nurtures a radical skepticism about identifying universally
good or bad actors or abstract solutions to political problems. International power interacts in complex ways with
diverse political spaces and within these spaces it is appropriated, hybridized, redescribed, hijacked, and tinkered with.
Government as a
ality
heuristic
focuses on performing complex diagnostics of events. It invites historically situated explorations and careful differentiations rather than
overarching demonizations of ‘‘power,’’ romanticizations of the ‘‘rebel’’ or the ‘‘the local.’’ More broadly, theoretical formulations that conceive
the subject in non-substantialist terms and focus on processes of subjectification, on the ambiguity of power discourses, and on hybridization as the terrain for political transformation, open ways for reconsidering political agency
beyond the dichotomy of oppression/rebellion. These alternative formulations also foster an ethics of political engagement, to be continuously taken up through
plural and uncertain practices, that demand continuous attention to ‘‘what happens’’ instead of fixations
on ‘‘what ought to be.’’83 Such ethics of engagement would not await the revolution to come or hope for a pristine ‘‘freedom’’ to be
regained. Instead, it would constantly attempt to twist the working of power by playing with whatever cards are
available and would require intense processes of reflexivity on the consequences of political choices. To
conclude with a famous phrase by Michel Foucault ‘‘my point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. So
my position leads not to apathy but to hyper- and pessimistic activism.’’84
We’re “State-as-heuristic”, not “State-as-descriptor”. That distinction matters for
Framework and Links. If “fiat’s fake”, heuristics still mean we’ll learn contingent
toolkit items AND avoid pitfalls of foundational “descriptor” frameworks. Those
reify and over-value idealism.
Zanotti ‘14
Dr. Laura Zanotti is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Virginia Tech. Her research and teaching include critical
political theory as well as international organizations, UN peacekeeping, democratization and the role of NGOs in post-conflict
governance.“Governmentality, Ontology, Methodology: Re-thinking Political Agency in the Global World” – Alternatives:
Global, Local, Political – vol 38(4):p. 288-304,. A little unclear if this is late 2013 or early 2014 – The Stated “Version of
Record” is Feb 20, 2014, but was originally published online on December 30th, 2013. Obtained via Sage Database.
One body of scholarship
uses governmentality as a heuristic tool to explore modalities of local and international government and to assess their effects in the
contexts where they are deployed; the other adopts this notion as a descriptive tool to theorize the globally oppressive features of international
liberalism. Scholars who use governmentality as a heuristic tool tend to conduct inquiries based upon analyses of practices of
government and resistance. These scholars rely on ethnographic inquiries, emphasizes the multifarious ways government works in practice (to include its
oppressive trajectories) and the ways uneven interactions of governmental strategies and resistance are contingently enacted. As
While there are important variations in the way international relations scholars use governmentality theory, for the purpose of my argument I identify two broad trajectories.2
examples, Didier Bigo, building upon Pierre Bourdieu, has encouraged a research methodology that privileges a relational approach and focuses on practice;3 William Walters has advocated considering governmentality as a research
program rather than as a ‘‘depiction of discrete systems of power;’’4 and Michael Merlingen has criticized the downplaying of resistance and the use of ‘‘governmentality’’ as interchangeable with liberalism.5 Many other scholars
have engaged in contextualized analyses of governmental tactics and resistance. Oded Lowenheim has shown how ‘‘responsibilization’’ has become an instrument for governing individual travelers through ‘‘travel warnings’’ as well
as for ‘‘developing states’’ through performance indicators;6 Wendy Larner and William Walters have questioned accounts of globalization as an ontological dimension of the present and advocated less substantialized accounts that
focus on studying the discourses, processes and practices through which globalization is made as a space and a political economy;7 Ronnie D. Lipschutz and James K. Rowe have looked at how localized practices of resistance may
engage and transform power relations;8 and in my own work, I have studied the deployment of disciplinary and governmental tools for reforming governments in peacekeeping operations and how these practices were hijacked and
Scholars who use governmentality as a descriptive tool focus instead on one particular
trajectory of global liberalism, that is on the convergence of knowledge and scrutiny of life processes (or biopolitics) and violence and theorize global liberalism as an extremely
effective formation, a coherent and powerful Leviathan, where biopolitical tools and violence come together to serve dominant classes or
resisted and by their targets.
states’ political agendas. As I will show, Giorgio Agamben, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, and Sergei Prozorov tend to embrace this position.10 The
distinction
between government as a heuristic and government as a descriptive
tool is central for debating political agency I argue that
scholars
ality
ality
.
, notwithstanding their critique of liberalism,
who use governmentality as a descriptive tool rely on the same ontological assumptions as the liberal order
they criticize and do move away from Foucault’s focus on historical practices in order to privilege abstract theorizations. By using governmentality
as a description of ‘‘liberalism’’ or ‘‘capitalism’’ instead of as a methodology of inquiry on power’s contingent modalities and technologies, these scholars tend to reify a
substantialist ontology that ultimately reinforces a liberal conceptualization of subjects and power as standing in a relation of externality and stifles the possibility of reimagining political agency on different grounds.
Descriptive governmentality’’ constructs a critique of the liberal international order based upon an ontological framework that
presupposes that power and subjects are entities possessing qualities that preexist relations. Power is imagined as a ‘‘mighty totality,’’ and subjects as
‘‘
monads endowed with potentia. As a result, the problematique of political agency is portrayed as a quest for the ‘‘liberation’’ of a subject ontologically gifted with a freedom that power inevitably oppresses. In this way, the
conceptualization of political agency remains confined within the liberal struggle of ‘‘freedom’’ and ‘‘oppression.’’ Even researchers who adopt a Foucauldian vocabulary end up falling into what Bigo has identified as ‘‘traps’’ of
I argue
that
political science and international relations theorizing, specifically essentialization and ahistoricism.
here
in order to reimagine political agency an ontological and epistemological turn is necessary, one that
relies upon a relational ontology. Relational ontological positions question adopting abstract stable entities, such as ‘‘structures,’’ ‘‘power,’’ or ‘‘subjects,’’ as explanations for what happens. Instead, they explore how these pillar
concepts of the Western political thought came to being, what kind of practices they facilitate, consolidate and result from, what ambiguities and aporias they contain, and how they are transformed.12 Relational ontologies nurture
‘‘modest’’ conceptualizations of political agency and also question the overwhelming stability of ‘‘mighty totalities,’’ such as for instance the international
liberal order or the state. In this framework, political action has more to do with playing with the cards that are dealt to
us to produce practical effects in specific contexts than with building idealized ‘‘new totalities’’ where perfect
conditions might exist. The political ethics that results from non-substantialist ontological positions is one that privileges ‘‘modest’’ engagements and weights
political choices with regard to the consequences and distributive effects they may produce in the context where they are made
rather than based upon their universal normative aspirations.13
AT: Hidden Motives
Pointing out hidden motives doesn’t work – it doesn’t disprove our specific
argument and it isn’t falsifiable.
Karlsson, Debunking Denialism, 2012
[Emil, “The Role of Motives in Arguments” http://debunkingdenialism.com/2012/07/06/the-role-ofmotives-in-arguments/]
What is the role of motives in arguments? Is it important or relevant what motives a person has for arguing for the validity of his
or her arguments? Or is it just a convenient way to shield oneself from accepting that one is mistaken? ¶ It may be useful to look at the
concept of substitution in cognitive psychology. It occurs when one is replacing the actual question with a
question that requires fewer cognitive resources to answer. The classic example is when the question being evaluated
concerns how common or how statistically likely something is. This is, for many, usually replaced by the simpler question of “how easy can I
imagine examples” of this something. The answer most people give to the question “How common is crimes by a certain ethnic minority?” will
depend on how easy it is to imagine examples that you know of it, usually corresponding to how frequent it has been portrayed in the media. This
is called availability heuristics. Other examples of substitution is replacing “how likely is this product to succeed in the market place?” with “how
much do I like it?”.¶ Could something
similar be going on when people start discussing the motives of an
individual instead of the merits of his or her arguments? The harder question, namely “is this a reasonableness argument?”, is
substituted by the easier question, namely “do I like this person’s position?”. This is usually no (otherwise there would be little point in having an
adversarial argument). So then this has to be expressed, and of course the opponent won’t say “well, I don’t like your position, therefore your
argument is wrong”, because that would be weird. Instead ,
I would wager that the person would start calling into question
the motives of the proponent instead, since no actual evaluation of the merits of the argument has taken
place.¶ So, in addition to being logically fallacious, the rhetorical technique of appealing to the motives of
a person making an argument (instead of addressing the actual argument), it is really a form of cognitive error. Clearly,
the merits of a particular claim does not depend on the motives of the person putting forward the
argument. It only rests on the evidence and arguments for or against the particular proposition.¶ The action
of dismissing the argument by calling into the question or pointing out the motives of the person making
the argument can be put into a few different fallacies, such as appeal to motive, argumentum ad hominem
circumstantial, genetic fallacy, bulverism, subject/motive shift, red herring, non sequitur or straw man. It will vary
depending on the specifics of the situation and sometimes it will fulfill several of these fallacies. Here are
some examples of how to categorize it:¶ Appeal to motive: an argument is attacked by calling into question the motives of the person making the
argument.¶ Argument ad hominem circumstantial: a more general form, where an argument is attacked by someone pointing out that the person
making the argument finds himself in a particular context that he or she tends to take that position. ¶ Genetic fallacy: a fallacy where an argument
is evaluated based on the personal characteristics of the person making the argument, or on the source of the argument in general.¶ Bulverism and
subject/motive shift: a type of argumentum ad hominem circumstantial fallacy where the argument for a position is rejected because it can be
explained why a person held that position.¶ Red herring: usually an intentional attempt at distracting the conversation from the actual issue (i.e.
the truth or falsity of the argument).¶ Non sequitur: because it does not follow that a person’s motives makes the argument he or she puts forward
incorrect.¶ Straw man: the person does not actually have the motives that is being assumed. ¶ They all are applicable, but one does not want to
continue to derail the discussion by getting into the details of why the opponents obsession with one’s motives. That is just an intellectual deadend. Instead, it
may be useful to point out that it is an appeal to motive and that the validity of a person’s
argument has nothing to do with that person’s motives. That covers the rational aspect of the rebuttal, but it is also important
to state that one does not have that particular motive, and to write a little bit about how one agree with some of the contentions presented by the
other person. If you are arguing against the death penalty, it can be beneficial to state that no, you do not secretly want criminals ending the life of
children or completely remove personal responsibility from society and that you, in fact, think that a criminal justice system that prevents and
reduces crime is of paramount importance. You do not have to have the exact same view of what makes an effective criminal justice system, only
that you share some of the same overarching values on the issue. This can defuse some of the antagonism in the debate.
Breaks down dialogue.
Benjamin and Smallwood, CRACKED, 2011
[Kathy and Karl, “5 Logical Fallacies That Make You Wrong More Than You Think”
http://www.cracked.com/article_19468_5-logical-fallacies-that-make-you-wrong-more-than-youthink.html]
#3. We Think Everyone's Out to Get Us¶ If you're smart and savvy, you know not to trust anyone. This is
why we can excuse ourselves for using shady or flat-out dishonest tactics to win an argument. We're sure
the other guy is doing much, much worse.¶ Getty¶ "I will yield that the sky is blue, if you acknowledge that
the moon landing was engineered by an unfrozen Walt Disney."¶ The world is so full of hidden agendas
and stupid ideologies that we have to do whatever we can to keep up. And "whatever we can" is often
code for lying.¶ The Science:¶ Think about all the people you've disagreed with this month. How many of
them do you think were being intentionally dishonest? Experts say you're almost definitely overshooting
the truth. It's called the trust gap, and scientist see it crop up every time one human is asked to estimate
how trustworthy another one is. In one study, subjects were asked to rate the likelihood that strangers
would share pretend winnings with them. The subjects figured about half were trustworthy enough to
share. When it came time to actually share, about 80 percent came through. The subjects thought the
world was almost twice as corrupt as it actually is.¶ Getty¶ "Most of the people in this calculus class would
cut my throat for a value meal."¶ The problem, as another study found, is that when you assume someone
is lying, you rarely find out that you're wrong. You just walk away congratulating yourself on being able
to sniff out an ambush from a mile away.¶ "Why would he flee the country? He loves surprise parties,
poker and judging blow job contests."¶ We start assuming people have ulterior motives and hidden
agendas as early as age 7 and from that point on, we never have to lose another argument for the rest of
our lives. After all, if we assume the person we're arguing with is lying, the only thing they can prove to
us is that they're a really good liar. This is how racism, sexism and any other sort of discrimination work.
Once someone's made-up their mind that color is the culprit, convincing them otherwise is going to be
close to impossible, no matter how ridiculous the scenario.¶ "I can't buy anymore white cars from you,
Sneaky Pete. They keep blowing up. What other colors do you have in this model?"¶ This is also where
you get claims like, "Those conservatives don't really think taxes are too high, they secretly hate poor
people!" or "Those liberals don't really think the poor need assistance, they're secretly communists!" It's
impossible to learn anything from a conversation with someone who you think is lying to you. The more
arguments you get into with those lying extremists from the other side of the aisle, the more you learn
about how they lie, the faster your brain turns off after they start talking.
AT: Serial Policy Failure
Alt fails – it is locked in the ivory tower – they can’t solve serial policy failure.
Walt, Harvard University international relations professor, 2011
[Stephen, “International Affairs and the Public Sphere” http://publicsphere.ssrc.org/walt-internationalaffairs-and-the-public-sphere/]
On the one hand, there is a widespread sense that academic research on global affairs is of declining
practical value, either as a guide to policymakers or as part of broader public discourse about
world affairs. Former policymakers complain that academic writing is “either irrelevant or
inaccessible to policy-makers. . . locked within the circle of esoteric scholarly discussion.” This
tendency helps explain Alexander George’s recollection that policymakers’ eyes “would glaze as soon as
I used the word theory.”[1] As Lawrence Mead noted in 2010: “Today’s political scientists often
address very narrow questions and they are often preoccupied with method and past literature.
Scholars are focusing more on themselves, less on the real world. . . . Research questions are getting
smaller and data-gathering is contracting. Inquiry is becoming obscurantist and ingrown.”[2]
Within the field of international affairs, this trend has led to repeated calls to “bridge the gap”
between the ivory tower and the policy community.[3] Consistent with that aim, a number of
prominent scholars have recently organized workshops or research projects seeking to challenge this
“cult of irrelevance” and deprogram its adherents, although it is not clear whether these efforts will
succeed in reversing the current drift.[4] This online symposium reflects a similar concern: how can the
academic world contribute to a healthy public conversation about our collective fate, one that leads
to more effective or just solutions to contemporary problems and helps humankind avoid major
policy disasters?
Frontline – AT: Structural Violence
War causes structural violence, not the other way around
Joshua Goldstein, American University International Relations Professor, 2001, “War and Gender:
How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa,” p.411-412
I began this book hoping to contribute in some way to a deeper understanding of war—an
understanding that would improve the caches of someday achieving real peace, by deleting war from
our human repertoire. In following the thread of gender running through war, I found the deeper
understanding I had hoped for - a multidisciplinary and multilevel engagement with the subject. Yet I
became somewhat more pessimistic about how quickly or easily war may end. The war system
emerges, from the evidence in this book, as relatively ubiquitous and robust. Efforts to change this
system must overcome several dilemmas mentioned in this book. First, peace activists face a dilemma
in thinking about causes of war and working for peace. Many peace scholars and activists support the
approach, "if you want peace, work for justice." Then, if one believes that sexism contributes to war,
one can work for gender justice specifically (perhaps among others) in order to pursue peace. This
approach brings strategic allies to the peace movement (women, labor, minorities), but rests on the
assumption that injustices cause war. The evidence in this book suggests that causality runs at least as
strongly the other way. War is not a product of capitalism, imperialism, gender, innate aggression, or
any other single cause, although all of these influence wars' outbreaks and outcomes. Rather, war has
in part fueled and sustained these and other injustices.9 So, "if you want peace, work for peace."
Indeed, if you want justice (gender and others), work for peace. Causality does not run just upward
through the levels of analysis, from types of individuals, societies, and governments up to war. It runs
downward too. Enloe suggests that changes in attitudes towards war and the military may be the most
important way to "reverse women's oppression." The dilemma is that peace work focused on justice
brings to the peace movement energy, allies, and moral grounding, yet, in light of this book's evidence,
the emphasis on injustice as the main cause of war seems to be empirically inadequate.
Structural violence doesn’t escalate – prefer proximate causes
Hinde and Pulkkinnen, Cambridge psychology professor and University of
Jyväskylä psychology professor, 2000
[Robert and Lea, DRAFT Background Paper for Working Group 1: HUMAN AGGRESSIVENESS AND WAR, 50th
Pugwash Conference On Science and World Affairs: "Eliminating the Causes of War" Queens' College, Cambridge ,
UK, 3-8 August http://www.pugwash.org/reports/pac/pac256/WG1draft1.htm]
People are capable of perpetrating the most terrible acts of violence on their fellows. From before
recorded history humans have killed humans, and violence is potentially present in every society. There
is no escaping the fact that the capacity to develop a propensity for violence is part of human nature.
But that does not mean that aggression is inevitable: temporary anger need not give rise to persistent
hostility, and hostility need not give rise to acts of aggression. And people also have the capacity to
care for the needs of others, and are capable of acts of great altruism and self-sacrifice. A subsidiary aim
of this workshop is to identify the factors that make aggressive tendencies predominate over the
cooperative and compassionate ones. Some degree of conflict of interest is often present in
relationships between individuals, in the relations between groups of individuals within states, and in
the relations between states: we are concerned with the factors that make such conflicts escalate into
violence.¶ The answer to that question depends critically on the context. While there may be some
factors in common, the bases of individual aggressiveness are very different from those involved in
mob violence, and they differ yet again from the factors influencing the bomb-aimer pressing the
button in a large scale international war. In considering whether acts which harm others are a
consequence of the aggressive motivation of individuals, it is essential to recognise the diversity of such
acts, which include interactions between individuals, violence between groups, and wars of the WW2
type. We shall see that, with increasing social complexity, individual aggressiveness becomes
progressively less important, but other aspects of human nature come to contribute to group
phenomena. Although research on human violence has focussed too often on the importance of one
factor or another, it is essential to remember that violence always has multiple causes, and the
interactions between the causal factors remain largely unexplored.
EXTN – AT: Structural Violence
Their conception of violence is reductive and can’t be solved
Boulding, University of Colorado Boulder economics professor, 1977
[Kenneth, Journal of Peace Research No. 1, Vol. XIV, “Twelve Friendly Quarrels with Johan Galtung”
JSTOR, p.83-4]
Finally, we come to the great Galtung¶ metaphors of 'structural
violence' 'and 'positive¶ peace'. They are metaphors
rather than¶ models, and for that very reason are suspect.¶ Metaphors always imply models and metaphors¶ have much
more persuasive power¶ than models do, for models tend to be the¶ preserve of the specialist. But when a metaphor¶ implies a bad model it
can be very¶ dangerous, for it is both persuasive and¶ wrong. The metaphor of structural violence¶ I would argue falls right into this category.¶
The metaphor is that poverty, deprivation,¶ ill health, low expectations of life, a condition¶ in which more than half the human race¶ lives, is
'like' a thug beating up the victim¶ and 'taking his money away from him in the¶ street, or it is 'like' a conqueror stealing the¶ land of the people
and reducing them to¶ slavery. The implication is that poverty and¶ its associated ills are the fault of the thug¶ or the conqueror and the
solution is to do¶ away with thugs and conquerors. While
there¶ is some truth in the metaphor, in the modern¶ world
at least there is not very much. Violence,¶ whether of the streets and the home,¶ or of the guerilla, of
the police, or of the¶ armed forces, is a very different phenomenon¶ from poverty. The processes which
create¶ and sustain poverty are not at all like the¶ processes which create and sustain violence,¶ although
like everything else in 'the world,¶ everything is somewhat related to everything¶ else.
There is a very real problem of the structures¶ which lead to violence, but unfortunately¶ Galitung's metaphor of
structural
violence¶ as he has used it has diverted attention¶ from this problem. Violence in the behavioral¶ sense, that
is, somebody actually¶ doing damage to somebody else and trying¶ to make them worse off, is a
'threshold'¶ phenomenon, rather like the boiling over of¶ a pot. The temperature under a pot can rise¶
for a long time without its boiling over, but¶ at some 'threshold boiling over will take¶ place. The study of the
structures which underlie¶ violence are a very important and¶ much neglected part of peace research and¶ indeed of social science in general.
Threshold¶ phenomena like violence are difficult to study because they represent 'breaks' in the¶ system
rather than uniformities. Violence,¶ whether between persons or organizations,¶ occurs when the 'strain'
on a system is too¶ great for its 'strength'. The metaphor here¶ is that violence is like what happens when¶ we
break a piece of chalk. Strength and¶ strain, however, especially in social systems,¶ are so interwoven historically that it is very¶ difficult
to separate them.
The diminution of violence involves two¶ possible strategies, or a mixture of the two;¶ one is the increase in the strength of the system,¶ 'the
other is the diminution of the strain.¶ The strength of systems involves habit, culture,¶ taboos, and sanctions, all these 'things¶ which enable a
system to stand increasing¶ strain without breaking down into violence.¶ The strains
on the system 'are largely dynamic¶ in
character, such as arms races, mutually¶ stimulated hostility, changes in relative¶ economic position or political power,¶ which are often
hard to identify. Conflicts of¶ interest 'are only part 'of the strain on a system,¶ and not always the most important part.¶ It is very hard
for people to know their interests,¶ and misperceptions of 'interest take¶ place mainly through the
dynamic processes,¶ not through the structural ones. It is only¶ perceptions of interest which affect
people's¶ behavior, not the 'real' interests, whatever¶ these may be, and the gap between perception¶
and reality can be very large and resistant¶ to change.
However, what Galitung calls structural¶
violence (which has been defined 'by one unkind¶ commentator as anything that Galitung¶
originally defined as any¶ unnecessarily low expectation of life, on that¶ assumption that
anybody who dies before¶ the allotted span has been killed, however¶ unintentionally and unknowingly,
by somebody¶ else. The concept has been expanded¶ to include all 'the problems of poverty,
destitution,¶ deprivation, and misery. These are¶ enormously real and are a very high priority¶ for
doesn't like) was
research and action, but they belong to¶ systems which are only peripherally related¶ to 'the structures
which produce violence.
This is not to say that the cultures of violence¶ and the cultures of poverty are not¶ sometimes related, though not
all poverty¶
cultures are cultures of violence, and certainly¶ not all cultures of violence are poverty¶ cultures. But the
dynamics of poverty and¶ the success or failure to rise out of it are of¶ a complexity far beyond anything
which the¶ metaphor of structural violence can offer.¶ While the metaphor of structural violence¶
performed a service in calling attention to¶ a problem, it may have done a disservice in¶ preventing us
from finding the answer.
Negative peace is a prerequisite.
Elshtain, U Chicago Social and Political Ethics Professor, Princeton University Advanced Study
Institute Fellow, Rockefeller Foundation Resident Scholar, Guggenheim Fellow, 2008
[Jean Bethke, “Peace, Order, Justice: Competing Understandings,” Millennium, 36.3, Sage]
We arrive, finally at model III. Let’s call this hard-headed peace. This is a peace that is mindful at every
point of justice claims and the overriding need for at least a modicum of civil order and tranquility if
other worthy goals, including justice claims, are to be heard and worked towards at all. Within hardheaded peace, various dichotomies – not only realism/idealism but peace/war – as absolutes, break
down. We recognise, with Hedley Bull and others, that war plays a central role in the maintenance of
international law and the preservation of the balance of power, thereby effecting changes that are
just. Of course, war can also be a destroyer of order and a force for injustice – but we cannot pace, the
peace advocates I have criticised - condemn every war in advance as necessarily a paragon of the latter
rather than the former.¶ As with every human endeavour this limited – neither absolute nor perpetual –
peace is a precious, fragile human achievement. Its advocates recognise that we often need disturbers
of the peace should a ‘peace’ be unjust even as we require defenders of the peace against those who
would overturn it in the name of some dangerously eschatological political ideology – the triumph of the
Aryan race, the triumph of the universal class – with their death camps and gulags to deal with those
who stand in the way of the absolutist projects.¶ I recall being haunted by a story I read – an ancient
Chinese parable – of the necessary precondition for perpetual peace, namely, that one should be so far
removed from any other ‘city’ that, in the dead calm of night, the echoes of a dog barking could not
carry – not alert some other city that aliens, strangers, were within striking distance. Your only options,
if you heard that dog bark, were to go kill the inhabitants of the other city and destroy it or to
incorporate them – to make them as ‘one’ with yourself – for the mere existence of this alien entity
marred ‘peace’. Extreme, yes. But instructive, for it alerts us to the often ontologically suspicious
features or absolute or perpetual peace – the presence of the alien suffices to mar it. As much as I loved
the late John Lennon and remain an unreconstructed Beatlesmaniac – his song ‘Imagine’ is the stringing
together of empty banalities: no states, no religion, nothing to kill or die for, and the world will be as
one. Fat chance. I don’t know how one gets from the song’s subjectivist anarchy to perpetual peace
but we confront the high hill of moral upmanship yet again in popular, simplistic form.¶ If, however, you
find the moral problems of international politics ‘infinitely complex, bewildering and perplexing’, in
Martin Wight’s words, it makes you a ‘natural Grotian’. I’m going to have to reflect on his claim a bit
more but this much is clear to me: War will never be abolished, so we must limit it ethically and
politically in the manner of just war teaching and here debates will turn on how ‘thick’ the restraints
must be;¶ Human nature – yes, I said it – politically incorrect as it is – is a complex admixture of good
and evil, nastiness and niceness, good Harry Potter with a bit of evil Voldemortian temptation thrown
in and this is unavoidable That means we should be appropriately humble about even our best
intentions, for on this earth there is neither absolute good nor absolute evil as a characteristic of either
persons or states; We must recall and recuperate an earlier moral conception of sovereignty to live
alongside the monopoly of the means of violence definition of the state, namely, an understanding of
sovereignty as responsibility; Correlatively, this means sovereigns can ‘unsovereign’ themselves, as Kings
could unking themselves and transmogrify into tyrants: this in the medieval right of resistance tradition.
Failed state phenomena indicate a moral as well as a political failure; indeed, the new ‘responsibility to
protect’ norm, it seems to me, requires something of this moral notion of sovereignty as responsibility if,
or when, we arrive at the conclusion of failure. A rogue state similarly signifies a failure.¶ There is, of
course, a question: who is authorised to act on behalf of the normative conception of sovereignty? It is
clear to me that, in the history of my own country, notions of our own security come from enlarging our
sphere of responsibility.¶ How well, or poorly, or wisely, or stupidly, we have done this is, of course,
open to fierce contestation, but my point is that a notion of responsibility – not absolute, disinterested
responsibility, of course – is a salient feature of American thinking on war and peace. The dangers in this
position lie in either overconstruing one’s responsibilities or falling into isolationism if, in acting out
responsibilities, one encounters intransigent difficulties or failure. Limited notions of peace and justice
carry with them notions of limited culpability; no one is in full and absolute control of events. It
behooves us to be less than grand in what we propose to undertake and to enact.¶ Martin Wight cites
Nehru, speaking of Gandhi, as having said that it was ‘his supreme ambition to wipe every tear from
every eye’. Nehru indicated, dryly, that perhaps we could lessen human suffering and misery but
eliminating it altogether was beyond our capacity. For those of us for whom the universe is by no
means ‘curable’, those seeking absolute cures are dangerous if, at times, noble people. Ambiguity in
our thinking about peace, order and justice within international politics is not a shortcoming lowing
from some ‘imperfectly theorised’ perspective or methodological weakness but, instead, inherent in
the complexities of the subject matter. If you make it simple you are, quite frankly, unreliable in some
basic sense.¶ In a 1996 book, Augustine and the Limits of Politics, I laid out the basis of an Augustinian
political ethic – one that does not aspire to and cannot provide a total political catechism or
architectonic of world order: The earthly city is never free from the dangers of bloodshed, sedition, and
war. A human being cannot even be certain of ‘his own conduct on the morrow,’ let alone specify and
adjudicate that of others in ways he or she foreordains. In this world of discontinuities and profound
yearnings, of sometimes terrible necessities, a human being can yet strive to maintain or to create an
order that approximates justice, to prevent the worst from happening, and to resist the seductive lure
of grandiosity.
AT: Root Cause/All Violence
No single cause of violence.
Muro-Ruiz, London School of Economics, 2002
[Diego, Politics Volume 22, Issue 2, pages 109–117, May 2002, “The Logic of Violence” Wiley]
Violence is, most of the time, a wilful choice, especially if it is made by an organi-sation. Individuals
present the scholar with a more difficult case to argue for. Scholars of violence have now a wide variety
of perspectives they can use – from sociology and political science, to psychology, psychiatry and even
biology – and should escape easy judgements. However, the fundamental difficulty for all of us is the
absence of a synthetic, general theory able of integrating less complete theories of violent behaviour. In
the absence of such a general theory, researchers should bear in mind that violence is a complex and
multifaceted phenomenon that resists mono-causal explanations. Future research on violence will have to
take in account the variety of approaches, since they each offer some understanding of the logic of
violence.
Frontline – AT: V2L
VTL is subjective.
Tännsjö, Stockholm University philosophy professor, 2011
[Torbjörn, “Shalt Thou Sometimes Murder? On the Ethics of Killing”
https://www.google.com/search?q=Shalt+Thou+Sometimes+Murder%3F+On+the+Ethics+of+Killing&o
q=Shalt+Thou+Sometimes+Murder%3F+On+the+Ethics+of+Killing&aqs=chrome..69i57.227j0j4&sourc
eid=chrome&espv=210&es_sm=122&ie=UTF-8]
I suppose it is correct to say that, if Schopenhauer is right, if life is never worth living, then according to
utilitarianism we should all commit suicide and put an end to humanity. But this does not mean that, each
of us should commit suicide. I commented on this in chapter two when I presented the idea that
utilitarianism should be applied, not only to individual actions, but to collective actions as well.¶ It is a
well-known fact that people rarely commit suicide. Some even claim that no one who is mentally sound
commits suicide. Could that be taken as evidence for the claim that people live lives worth living? That
would be rash. Many people are not utilitarians. They may avoid suicide because they believe that it is
morally wrong to kill oneself. It is also a possibility that, even if people lead lives not worth living, they
believe they do. And even if some may believe that their lives, up to now, have not been worth living,
their future lives will be better. They may be mistaken about this. They may hold false expectations about
the future.¶ From the point of view of evolutionary biology, it is natural to assume that people should
rarely commit suicide. If we set old age to one side, it has poor survival value (of one’s genes) to kill
oneself. So it should be expected that it is difficult for ordinary people to kill themselves. But then
theories about cognitive dissonance, known from psychology, should warn us that we may come to
believe that we live better lives than we do.¶ My strong belief is that most of us live lives worth living.
However, I do believe that our ¶ lives are close to the point where they stop being worth living. But then it
is at least not very far-fetched to think that they may be worth not living, after all. My assessment may be
too optimistic.¶ Let us just for the sake of the argument assume that our lives are not worth living, and let
us accept that, if this is so, we should all kill ourselves. As I noted above, this does not answer the
question what we should do, each one of us. My conjecture is that we should not commit suicide. The
explanation is simple. If I kill myself, many people will suffer. Here is a rough explanation of how this
will happen:¶ ... suicide “survivors” confront a complex array of feelings. Various forms of guilt are quite
common, such as that arising from (a) the belief that one contributed to the suicidal person's anguish, or
(b) the failure to recognize that anguish, or (c) the inability to prevent the suicidal act itself. Suicide also
leads to rage, loneliness, and awareness of vulnerability in those left behind. Indeed, the sense that suicide
is an essentially selfish act dominates many popular perceptions of suicide. ¶ The fact that all our lives
lack meaning, if they do, does not mean that others will follow my example. They will go on with their
lives and their false expectations — at least for a while devastated because of my suicide. But then I have
an obligation, for their sake, to go on with my life. It is highly likely that, by committing suicide, I create
more suffering (in their lives) than I avoid (in my life).
Going on with my life in spite of the fact that it lacks meaning (contains a net surplus of pain over
happiness) is not such a big deal. Even if the net balance of the rest of my life does consist of pain rather
than happiness, this is something I am already used to. I have strategies to cope with it. They are not
perfect. After all, given the hypothesis in this section, my net balance will be negative. However, this is a
sacrifice, not too heavy, I should make in the best interest of my dear ones.
EXTN – AT: V2L
Value to life is subjective and resilient.
The Onion, 2010
[Issue 46 19, 5-10-10, “Exhausted Noam Chomsky Just Going To Try And Enjoy The Day For Once”
http://www.theonion.com/articles/exhausted-noam-chomsky-just-going-to-try-and-enjoy,17404/]
Describing himself as "terribly exhausted," famed linguist and political dissident Noam Chomsky said
Monday that he was taking a break from combating the hegemony of the American imperialist machine to
try and take it easy for once.¶ "I just want to lie in a hammock and have a nice relaxing morning," said the
outspoken anarcho-syndicalist academic, who first came to public attention with his breakthrough 1957
book Syntactic Structures. "The systems of control designed to manufacture consent among a largely
ignorant public will still be there for me to worry about tomorrow. Today, I'm just going to kick back and
enjoy some much-needed Noam Time."¶ "No fighting against institutional racism, no exposing the
legacies of colonialist ideologies still persistent today, no standing up to the widespread dissemination of
misinformation and state-sanctioned propaganda," Chomsky added. "Just a nice, cool breeze through an
open window on a warm spring day."¶ Sources reported that the 81-year-old Chomsky, a vociferous,
longtime critic of U.S. foreign policy and the political economy of the mass media, was planning to use
Monday to tidy up around the house a bit, take a leisurely walk in the park, and possibly attend an
afternoon showing of Date Night at the local megaplex.¶ Sitting down to a nice oatmeal breakfast,
Chomsky picked up a copy of Time, a deceitful, pro-corporate publication that he said would normally
infuriate him.¶ "Yes, this magazine may be nothing more than a subtle media tool intended to obfuscate
the government's violent agenda with comforting bromides, but I'm not going to let that get under my
skin," Chomsky said. "I mean, why should I? It's absolutely beautiful outside. I should just go and enjoy
myself and not think about any of this stuff."¶ Added Chomsky, glancing back over at the periodical,
"Even if it is just another way in which individuals are methodically fed untruths that slowly shape their
perceptions of reality, dulling their ability to challenge and defy a government bent on carrying out its
own selfish and destructive—no, no Noam, not today, none of that today."¶ According to sources close to
the thinker, Chomsky also considered taking time to "plop down on the couch in [his] boxers and watch
TV," but grew suddenly enraged when The Price Is Right came on, commodifying the lie of American
consumer satisfaction in a pseudo- entertainment context.¶ "Just change the channel, just relax and switch
to something that isn't mindless pabulum for the masses," said Chomsky, reaching for the remote control.
"No need to get furious."¶ Chomsky, who often defines himself as a libertarian socialist, then changed the
channel to ESPN, taking a moment to acknowledge the role of professional sports as a "weapon of mass
distraction," keeping the American people occupied with trivial competitions so they do not focus on
opposing the status quo with grassroots movements against foreign and domestic policies that ultimately
harm them.¶ "Stupid NBA playoffs," Chomsky said. "At least it's better than that NCAA March Madness
crap. A university is supposed to be a center of learning that questions the state's crafted messaging, not
an entertainment factory."¶ Sources said Chomsky took what was supposed to be a refreshing drive in the
countryside, only to find himself obsessing over the role petroleum plays in the economic and military
policies that collude with multinational corporate powers.¶ After stopping at a roadside McDonald's,
Chomsky was unable to enjoy the Big Mac he purchased, due to the popular restaurant chain's
participation in selling "a bill of goods" to the American people, who consume the unhealthy fast food
and thereby bolster the capitalist system rather than buying from local farmers in order to equalize the
distribution of wealth and eat more nutritiously.¶ Chomsky also found the burger to be too salty.¶ "All
right, all right," the noted critic and philosopher said, "I'm going back home, writing one—just one—
reasoned, scathing essay, and getting it out of my system. But then I'm definitely going back to the park to
walk around and just enjoy the nice weather. I'm serious."¶ "Because there's got to be more to life than the
way that wage slavery strips the individual of his or her inherent dignity and personal integrity," Chomsky
continued. "Right?"
2ac Frontlines
2ac – Policy FW – General
1. Claims are contingent – they must disprove each one and judge gets to choose
justifications because plan focus is good – key to fairness – otherwise the aff would
always lose.
2. We get to weigh case
a. Moots the 1ac – eliminates 8 minutes of aff offense and makes it impossible to be
aff
b. Implementation education – allowing us to weigh the case is key to test the
alternative against different advocacies
3. Perm do both – either the alt solves the link to the aff and perm solves OR the sqo
takes out the alt
4. Perm do the alt – if the alt solves the aff – then it links to the K
5. They don’t solve the case – [explanation of case impacts and why aff is key] – even
if the alt solves it only solves in the long term – the impacts escalate in the short term
–prefer specific escalation scenarios with brink and trigger over nebulous impacts
6. Evaluate consequences – ethical absolutism results in tunnel vision.
Isaac, Indiana University James H. Rudy Professor of Political Science and Center for the Study of
Democracy and Public Life director, Spring 2002
(Jeffrey C. “Ends, Means, and Politics,” Dissent Magazine Vol. 49 Issue 2, p32)
Power is not a dirty word or an unfortunate feature of the world. It is the core of politics. Power is the ability to effect outcomes in the world.
Politics, in large part, involves contests over the distribution and use of power. To
accomplish anything in the political world, one
must attend to the means that are necessary to bring it about. And to develop such means is to develop, and to
exercise, power. To say this is not to say that power is beyond moral- ity. It is to say that power is not reducible to morality. As writers such as
Niccolo Machiavelli, Max Weber, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Hannah Arendt have taught, an
unyielding concern with moral
goodness undercuts political responsibility. The concern may be morally laudable, reflecting a kind of personal integrity, but it
suffers from three fatal flaws: (1) It fails to see that the purity of one’s intention does not ensure the
achievement of what one intends. Abjuring violence or refusing to make common cause with morally
compromised parties may seem like the right thing; but if such tactics entail impotence, then it is hard
to view them as serving any moral good beyond the clean con- science of their supporters; (2) it fails to
see that in a world of real violence and injustice, moral purity is not simply a form of powerless- ness;
it is often a form of complicity in injustice. This is why, from the standpoint of politics—as opposed to religion—pacifism is
always a potentially immoral stand. In categorically repudiating violence, it refuses in principle to oppose certain
violent injustices with any effect; and (3) it fails to see that politics is as much about unintended
consequences as it is about intentions; it is the effects of action, rather than the motives of action,
that is most significant. Just as the alignment with “good” may engender impotence, it is often the pursuit of “good”
that generates evil. This is the lesson of communism in the twentieth century: it is not enough that one’s goals
be sincere or idealistic; it is equally important, always, to ask about the effects of pursuing these goals
and to judge these effects in pragmatic and historically contextualized ways. Moral absolutism inhibits
this judgment. It alienates those who are not true believers. It promotes arrogance. And it undermines
political effectiveness.
2ac – Policy FW – Method Ks
1. Claims are contingent – they must disprove each one and judge gets to choose
justifications because plan focus is good – key to fairness – otherwise the aff would
always lose.
2. Method focus fails – never results in action.
Fearon, Stanford Political Science Professor, and Wendt, Ohio State IR Professor,
2002
[James and Alexander, Handbook of International Relations, p. 68]
It should be stressed that in advocating a pragmatic view we are not endorsing method-driven social
science. Too much research in international relations chooses problems or things to be explained with
a view to whether the analysis will provide support for one or another methodological 'ism'. But the
point of IR scholarship should be to answer questions about international politics that are of great
normative concern, not to validate methods. Methods are means, not ends in themselves. As a matter
of personal scholarly choice it may be reasonable to stick with one method and see how far it takes us.
But since we do not know how far that is, if the goal of the discipline is insight into world politics then
it makes little sense to rule out one or the other approach on a priori grounds. In that case a method
indeed becomes a tacit ontology, which may lead to neglect of whatever problems it is poorly suited
to address. Being conscious about these choices is why it is important to distinguish between the
ontological, empirical, and pragmatic levels of the rationalist-constructivist debate. We favor the
pragmatic approach on heuristic grounds, but we certainly believe a conversation should continue on all
three levels.
3. We get to weigh case
a. Moots the 1ac – eliminates 8 minutes of aff offense and makes it impossible to be
aff
b. Implementation education – allowing us to weigh the case is key to test the
alternative against different advocacies
4. Perm do both – either the alt solves the link to the aff and perm solves OR the sqo
takes out the alt
5. Perm do the alt – if the alt solves the aff – then it links to the K
6. They don’t solve the case – [explanation of case impacts and why aff is key] – even
if the alt solves it only solves in the long term – the impacts escalate in the short term
–prefer specific escalation scenarios with brink and trigger over nebulous impacts
7. Evaluate consequences – ethical absolutism results in tunnel vision.
Isaac, Indiana University James H. Rudy Professor of Political Science and Center for the Study of
Democracy and Public Life director, Spring 2002
(Jeffrey C. “Ends, Means, and Politics,” Dissent Magazine Vol. 49 Issue 2, p32)
Power is not a dirty word or an unfortunate feature of the world. It is the core of politics. Power is the ability to effect outcomes in the world.
Politics, in large part, involves contests over the distribution and use of power. To
accomplish anything in the political world, one
must attend to the means that are necessary to bring it about. And to develop such means is to develop, and to
exercise, power. To say this is not to say that power is beyond moral- ity. It is to say that power is not reducible to morality. As writers such as
Niccolo Machiavelli, Max Weber, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Hannah Arendt have taught, an
unyielding concern with moral
goodness undercuts political responsibility. The concern may be morally laudable, reflecting a kind of personal integrity, but it
suffers from three fatal flaws: (1) It fails to see that the purity of one’s intention does not ensure the
achievement of what one intends. Abjuring violence or refusing to make common cause with morally
compromised parties may seem like the right thing; but if such tactics entail impotence, then it is hard
to view them as serving any moral good beyond the clean con- science of their supporters; (2) it fails to
see that in a world of real violence and injustice, moral purity is not simply a form of powerless- ness;
it is often a form of complicity in injustice. This is why, from the standpoint of politics—as opposed to religion—pacifism is
always a potentially immoral stand. In categorically repudiating violence, it refuses in principle to oppose certain
violent injustices with any effect; and (3) it fails to see that politics is as much about unintended
consequences as it is about intentions; it is the effects of action, rather than the motives of action,
that is most significant. Just as the alignment with “good” may engender impotence, it is often the pursuit of “good”
that generates evil. This is the lesson of communism in the twentieth century: it is not enough that one’s goals
be sincere or idealistic; it is equally important, always, to ask about the effects of pursuing these goals
and to judge these effects in pragmatic and historically contextualized ways. Moral absolutism inhibits
this judgment. It alienates those who are not true believers. It promotes arrogance. And it undermines
political effectiveness.
2ac – Policy FW – Ontology Ks
1. Claims are contingent – they must disprove each one and judge gets to choose
justifications because plan focus is good – key to fairness – otherwise the aff would
always lose.
2. We get to weigh case
a. Moots the 1ac – eliminates 8 minutes of aff offense and makes it impossible to be
aff
b. Implementation education – allowing us to weigh the case is key to test the
alternative against different advocacies
3. Perm do both – either the alt solves the link to the aff and perm solves OR the sqo
takes out the alt
4. Perm do the alt – if the alt solves the aff – then it links to the K
5. They don’t solve the case – [explanation of case impacts and why aff is key] – even
if the alt solves it only solves in the long term – the impacts escalate in the short term
–prefer specific escalation scenarios with brink and trigger over nebulous impacts
6. Evaluate consequences – ethical absolutism results in tunnel vision.
Isaac, Indiana University James H. Rudy Professor of Political Science and Center for the Study of
Democracy and Public Life director, Spring 2002
(Jeffrey C. “Ends, Means, and Politics,” Dissent Magazine Vol. 49 Issue 2, p32)
Power is not a dirty word or an unfortunate feature of the world. It is the core of politics. Power is the ability to effect outcomes in the world.
Politics, in large part, involves contests over the distribution and use of power. To
accomplish anything in the political world, one
must attend to the means that are necessary to bring it about. And to develop such means is to develop, and to
exercise, power. To say this is not to say that power is beyond moral- ity. It is to say that power is not reducible to morality. As writers such as
Niccolo Machiavelli, Max Weber, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Hannah Arendt have taught, an
unyielding concern with moral
goodness undercuts political responsibility. The concern may be morally laudable, reflecting a kind of personal integrity, but it
suffers from three fatal flaws: (1) It fails to see that the purity of one’s intention does not ensure the
achievement of what one intends. Abjuring violence or refusing to make common cause with morally
compromised parties may seem like the right thing; but if such tactics entail impotence, then it is hard
to view them as serving any moral good beyond the clean con- science of their supporters; (2) it fails to
see that in a world of real violence and injustice, moral purity is not simply a form of powerless- ness;
it is often a form of complicity in injustice. This is why, from the standpoint of politics—as opposed to religion—pacifism is
always a potentially immoral stand. In categorically repudiating violence, it refuses in principle to oppose certain
violent injustices with any effect; and (3) it fails to see that politics is as much about unintended
consequences as it is about intentions; it is the effects of action, rather than the motives of action,
that is most significant. Just as the alignment with “good” may engender impotence, it is often the pursuit of “good”
that generates evil. This is the lesson of communism in the twentieth century: it is not enough that one’s goals
be sincere or idealistic; it is equally important, always, to ask about the effects of pursuing these goals
and to judge these effects in pragmatic and historically contextualized ways. Moral absolutism inhibits
this judgment. It alienates those who are not true believers. It promotes arrogance. And it undermines
political effectiveness.
7. Constructing prior questions doesn’t disprove the aff – it results in generalizations
and inaction.
Owen, University of Southampton political theory professor, 2002
[David, Millennium Journal of International Studies, Vol 31 No 3, “Re-orienting International Relations:
On Pragmatism, Pluralism, and Practical Reason” Sagepub]
Commenting on the ‘philosophical turn’ in IR, Wæver remarks that ‘[a]¶ frenzy for words like “epistemology”
and “ontology” often
signals this¶ philosophical turn’, although he goes on to comment that these terms are¶ often used loosely.4 However, loosely
deployed or not, it is clear that debates¶ concerning ontology and epistemology play a central role in the¶
contemporary IR theory wars. In one respect, this is unsurprising since it¶ is a characteristic feature of the social sciences that
periods of disciplinary¶ disorientation involve recourse to reflection on the philosophical¶ commitments of different theoretical approaches,
and there
is no doubt¶ that such reflection can play a valuable role in making explicit the¶ commitments
that characterise (and help individuate) diverse theoretical¶ positions. Yet, such a philosophical turn is not
without its dangers and I¶ will briefly mention three before turning to consider a confusion that has,¶ I will suggest, helped to promote
the IR theory wars by motivating this¶ philosophical turn.
The first danger with the philosophical turn is that it has an inbuilt tendency to prioritise issues of
ontology and epistemology over¶ explanatory and/or interpretive power as if the latter two were merely
a¶ simple function of the former. But while the explanatory and/or interpretive¶ power of a theoretical
account is not wholly independent of its ontological¶ and/or epistemological commitments (otherwise
criticism of these features¶ would not be a criticism that had any value), it is by no means clear that it¶ is, in contrast, wholly
dependent on these philosophical commitments.¶ Thus, for example, one need not be sympathetic to rational
choice theory¶ to recognise that it can provide powerful accounts of certain kinds of¶ problems, such as the
tragedy of the commons in which dilemmas of¶ collective action are foregrounded. It may, of course, be the case that the¶
advocates of rational choice theory cannot give a good account of why¶ this type of theory is powerful in
accounting for this class of problems¶ (i.e., how it is that the relevant actors come to exhibit features in these¶ circumstances that
approximate the assumptions of rational choice theory)¶ and, if this is the case, it is a philosophical weakness—but this
does not¶ undermine the point that, for a certain class of problems, rational choice¶ theory may provide
the best account available to us. In other words, while¶ the critical judgement of theoretical accounts in
terms of their ontological¶ and/or epistemological sophistication is one kind of critical judgement, it¶ is
not the only or even necessarily the most important kind.
The second danger run by the philosophical turn is that because
prioritisation of ontology and epistemology promotes
theory-construction¶ from philosophical first principles, it cultivates a theory-driven rather than¶
problem-driven approach to IR. Paraphrasing Ian Shapiro, the point can¶ be put like this: since it is the case that there is
always a plurality of possible¶ true descriptions of a given action, event or phenomenon, the challenge
is¶ to decide which is the most apt in terms of getting a perspicuous grip on¶ the action, event or
phenomenon in question given the purposes of the¶ inquiry; yet, from this standpoint, ‘theory-driven
work is part of a¶ reductionist program’ in that it ‘dictates always opting for the description¶ that calls for
the explanation that flows from the preferred model or¶ theory’.5 The justification offered for this strategy rests on the
mistaken¶ belief that it is necessary for social science because general explanations¶ are required to characterise the classes of phenomena
studied in similar¶ terms. However, as Shapiro points out, this is to misunderstand the¶ enterprise of science since ‘whether there are general
explanations for¶ classes of phenomena is a question for social-scientific inquiry, not to be¶ prejudged before conducting that inquiry’.6
Moreover, this
strategy easily¶ slips into the promotion of the pursuit of generality over that of empirical¶
validity.
The third danger is that the preceding two combine to encourage the¶ formation of a particular image of disciplinary debate in IR—what might¶
be called (only slightly tongue in cheek) ‘the Highlander view’—namely,¶ an image of warring theoretical approaches with each, despite
occasional¶ temporary tactical alliances, dedicated to the strategic achievement of¶ sovereignty over the disciplinary field. It encourages this
view because¶ the
turn to, and prioritisation of, ontology and epistemology stimulates the idea that there
can only be one theoretical approach which gets things¶ right, namely, the theoretical approach that
gets its ontology and¶ epistemology right. This image feeds back into IR exacerbating the first¶ and
second dangers, and so a potentially vicious circle arises.
8. Survival comes before being.
Zimmerman, CU, Boulder Philosophy Professor and Center for Humanities and Arts Director,
1996
[Michael, "Minding Nature: The Philosophers of Ecology," ed. David Macauley p. 74]
We may approach the issue of what Heidegger may teach today’s radical environmentalists by examining
an issue about which they and Heidegger would profoundly disagree. Heidegger claimed that there is a
greater danger than the destruction of all life on earth by nuclear war. For radical environmentalists,
it is hard to imagine anything more dangerous than the total destruction of the biosphere!
Heidegger argued, however, that worse than such annihilation would be the totally technologized world in
which material “happiness” for everyone is achieved, but in which humanity would be left with a
radically constricted capacity for encountering the being of entities. This apparently exorbitant claim may
be partially mitigated by the following consideration. If human existence lost all relationship to
transcendent being, entities could no longer show themselves at all, and in this sense would no
longer “be.” Who needs nuclear war, Heidegger asked rhetorically, if entities have already ceased to
be? For many environmentalists, such a question reveals the extent to which Heidegger remained part
of the human-centered tradition that he wanted to overcome. By estimating so highly human
Dasein’s contribution to the manifesting of things, Heidegger may well have underestimated the
contribution to the manifesting of things, Heidegger may well have underestimated the contribution
made by many other forms of life, for which the extinction of humankind’s ontological awareness
would be far preferable to their own extinction in nuclear war!
2ac – Policy FW – Epistemology Ks
1. Claims are contingent – they must disprove each one and judge gets to choose
justifications because plan focus is good – key to fairness – otherwise the aff would
always lose.
2. We get to weigh case
a. Moots the 1ac – eliminates 8 minutes of aff offense and makes it impossible to be
aff
b. Implementation education – allowing us to weigh the case is key to test the
alternative against different advocacies
3. Perm do both – either the alt solves the link to the aff and perm solves OR the sqo
takes out the alt
4. Perm do the alt – if the alt solves the aff – then it links to the K
5. They don’t solve the case – [explanation of case impacts and why aff is key] – even
if the alt solves it only solves in the long term – the impacts escalate in the short term
–prefer specific escalation scenarios with brink and trigger over nebulous impacts
6. Evaluate consequences – ethical absolutism results in tunnel vision.
Isaac, Indiana University James H. Rudy Professor of Political Science and Center for the Study of
Democracy and Public Life director, Spring 2002
(Jeffrey C. “Ends, Means, and Politics,” Dissent Magazine Vol. 49 Issue 2, p32)
Power is not a dirty word or an unfortunate feature of the world. It is the core of politics. Power is the ability to effect outcomes in the world.
Politics, in large part, involves contests over the distribution and use of power. To
accomplish anything in the political world, one
must attend to the means that are necessary to bring it about. And to develop such means is to develop, and to
exercise, power. To say this is not to say that power is beyond moral- ity. It is to say that power is not reducible to morality. As writers such as
Niccolo Machiavelli, Max Weber, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Hannah Arendt have taught, an
unyielding concern with moral
goodness undercuts political responsibility. The concern may be morally laudable, reflecting a kind of personal integrity, but it
suffers from three fatal flaws: (1) It fails to see that the purity of one’s intention does not ensure the
achievement of what one intends. Abjuring violence or refusing to make common cause with morally
compromised parties may seem like the right thing; but if such tactics entail impotence, then it is hard
to view them as serving any moral good beyond the clean con- science of their supporters; (2) it fails to
see that in a world of real violence and injustice, moral purity is not simply a form of powerless- ness;
it is often a form of complicity in injustice. This is why, from the standpoint of politics—as opposed to religion—pacifism is
always a potentially immoral stand. In categorically repudiating violence, it refuses in principle to oppose certain
violent injustices with any effect; and (3) it fails to see that politics is as much about unintended
consequences as it is about intentions; it is the effects of action, rather than the motives of action,
that is most significant. Just as the alignment with “good” may engender impotence, it is often the pursuit of “good”
that generates evil. This is the lesson of communism in the twentieth century: it is not enough that one’s goals
be sincere or idealistic; it is equally important, always, to ask about the effects of pursuing these goals
and to judge these effects in pragmatic and historically contextualized ways. Moral absolutism inhibits
this judgment. It alienates those who are not true believers. It promotes arrogance. And it undermines
political effectiveness.
7. Constructing prior questions doesn’t disprove the aff – it results in generalizations
and inaction.
Owen, University of Southampton political theory professor, 2002
[David, Millennium Journal of International Studies, Vol 31 No 3, “Re-orienting International Relations:
On Pragmatism, Pluralism, and Practical Reason” Sagepub]
Commenting on the ‘philosophical turn’ in IR, Wæver remarks that ‘[a]¶ frenzy for words like “epistemology”
and “ontology” often
signals this¶ philosophical turn’, although he goes on to comment that these terms are¶ often used loosely.4 However, loosely
deployed or not, it is clear that debates¶ concerning ontology and epistemology play a central role in the¶
contemporary IR theory wars. In one respect, this is unsurprising since it¶ is a characteristic feature of the social sciences that
periods of disciplinary¶ disorientation involve recourse to reflection on the philosophical¶ commitments of different theoretical approaches,
and there
is no doubt¶ that such reflection can play a valuable role in making explicit the¶ commitments
that characterise (and help individuate) diverse theoretical¶ positions. Yet, such a philosophical turn is not
without its dangers and I¶ will briefly mention three before turning to consider a confusion that has,¶ I will suggest, helped to promote
the IR theory wars by motivating this¶ philosophical turn.
The first danger with the philosophical turn is that it has an inbuilt tendency to prioritise issues of
ontology and epistemology over¶ explanatory and/or interpretive power as if the latter two were merely
a¶ simple function of the former. But while the explanatory and/or interpretive¶ power of a theoretical
account is not wholly independent of its ontological¶ and/or epistemological commitments (otherwise
criticism of these features¶ would not be a criticism that had any value), it is by no means clear that it¶ is, in contrast, wholly
dependent on these philosophical commitments.¶ Thus, for example, one need not be sympathetic to rational
choice theory¶ to recognise that it can provide powerful accounts of certain kinds of¶ problems, such as the
tragedy of the commons in which dilemmas of¶ collective action are foregrounded. It may, of course, be the case that the¶
advocates of rational choice theory cannot give a good account of why¶ this type of theory is powerful in
accounting for this class of problems¶ (i.e., how it is that the relevant actors come to exhibit features in these¶ circumstances that
approximate the assumptions of rational choice theory)¶ and, if this is the case, it is a philosophical weakness—but this
does not¶ undermine the point that, for a certain class of problems, rational choice¶ theory may provide
the best account available to us. In other words, while¶ the critical judgement of theoretical accounts in
terms of their ontological¶ and/or epistemological sophistication is one kind of critical judgement, it¶ is
not the only or even necessarily the most important kind.
The second danger run by the philosophical turn is that because
prioritisation of ontology and epistemology promotes
theory-construction¶ from philosophical first principles, it cultivates a theory-driven rather than¶
problem-driven approach to IR. Paraphrasing Ian Shapiro, the point can¶ be put like this: since it is the case that there is
always a plurality of possible¶ true descriptions of a given action, event or phenomenon, the challenge
is¶ to decide which is the most apt in terms of getting a perspicuous grip on¶ the action, event or
phenomenon in question given the purposes of the¶ inquiry; yet, from this standpoint, ‘theory-driven
work is part of a¶ reductionist program’ in that it ‘dictates always opting for the description¶ that calls for
the explanation that flows from the preferred model or¶ theory’.5 The justification offered for this strategy rests on the
mistaken¶ belief that it is necessary for social science because general explanations¶ are required to characterise the classes of phenomena
studied in similar¶ terms. However, as Shapiro points out, this is to misunderstand the¶ enterprise of science since ‘whether there are general
explanations for¶ classes of phenomena is a question for social-scientific inquiry, not to be¶ prejudged before conducting that inquiry’.6
Moreover, this
strategy easily¶ slips into the promotion of the pursuit of generality over that of empirical¶
validity.
The third danger is that the preceding two combine to encourage the¶ formation of a particular image of disciplinary debate in IR—what might¶
be called (only slightly tongue in cheek) ‘the Highlander view’—namely,¶ an image of warring theoretical approaches with each, despite
occasional¶ temporary tactical alliances, dedicated to the strategic achievement of¶ sovereignty over the disciplinary field. It encourages this
view because¶ the
turn to, and prioritisation of, ontology and epistemology stimulates the idea that there
can only be one theoretical approach which gets things¶ right, namely, the theoretical approach that
gets its ontology and¶ epistemology right. This image feeds back into IR exacerbating the first¶ and
second dangers, and so a potentially vicious circle arises.
2ac – Policy FW – Discourse Ks
1. Claims are contingent – they must disprove each one and judge gets to choose
justifications because plan focus is good – key to fairness – otherwise the aff would
always lose.
2. We get to weigh case
a. Moots the 1ac – eliminates 8 minutes of aff offense and makes it impossible to be
aff
b. Implementation education – allowing us to weigh the case is key to test the
alternative against different advocacies
3. Perm do both – either the alt solves the link to the aff and perm solves OR the sqo
takes out the alt
4. Perm do the alt – if the alt solves the aff – then it links to the K
5. They don’t solve the case – [explanation of case impacts and why aff is key] – even
if the alt solves it only solves in the long term – the impacts escalate in the short term
–prefer specific escalation scenarios with brink and trigger over nebulous impacts
6. Evaluate consequences – ethical absolutism results in tunnel vision.
Isaac, Indiana University James H. Rudy Professor of Political Science and Center for the Study of
Democracy and Public Life director, Spring 2002
(Jeffrey C. “Ends, Means, and Politics,” Dissent Magazine Vol. 49 Issue 2, p32)
Power is not a dirty word or an unfortunate feature of the world. It is the core of politics. Power is the ability to effect outcomes in the world.
Politics, in large part, involves contests over the distribution and use of power. To
accomplish anything in the political world, one
must attend to the means that are necessary to bring it about. And to develop such means is to develop, and to
exercise, power. To say this is not to say that power is beyond moral- ity. It is to say that power is not reducible to morality. As writers such as
Niccolo Machiavelli, Max Weber, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Hannah Arendt have taught, an
unyielding concern with moral
goodness undercuts political responsibility. The concern may be morally laudable, reflecting a kind of personal integrity, but it
suffers from three fatal flaws: (1) It fails to see that the purity of one’s intention does not ensure the
achievement of what one intends. Abjuring violence or refusing to make common cause with morally
compromised parties may seem like the right thing; but if such tactics entail impotence, then it is hard
to view them as serving any moral good beyond the clean con- science of their supporters; (2) it fails to
see that in a world of real violence and injustice, moral purity is not simply a form of powerless- ness;
it is often a form of complicity in injustice. This is why, from the standpoint of politics—as opposed to religion—pacifism is
always a potentially immoral stand. In categorically repudiating violence, it refuses in principle to oppose certain
violent injustices with any effect; and (3) it fails to see that politics is as much about unintended
consequences as it is about intentions; it is the effects of action, rather than the motives of action,
that is most significant. Just as the alignment with “good” may engender impotence, it is often the pursuit of “good”
that generates evil. This is the lesson of communism in the twentieth century: it is not enough that one’s goals
be sincere or idealistic; it is equally important, always, to ask about the effects of pursuing these goals
and to judge these effects in pragmatic and historically contextualized ways. Moral absolutism inhibits
this judgment. It alienates those who are not true believers. It promotes arrogance. And it undermines
political effectiveness.
7. Discourse doesn’t shape reality – structures do.
Tuathail, Department of Geography at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, Political Geography, 96 (Gearoid
Tuathail, Department of Geography at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, Political Geography, 15(6-7), 664
While theoretical debates at academic conferences are important to academics, the discourse and
concerns of foreign-policy decision- makers are quite different, so different that they constitute a
distinctive problem- solving, theory-averse, policy-making subculture. There is a danger that academics
assume that the discourses they engage are more significant in the practice of foreign policy and the
exercise of power than they really are. This is not, however, to minimize the obvious importance of
academia as a general institutional structure among many that sustain certain epistemic communities in
particular states. In general, I do not disagree with Dalby’s fourth point about politics and discourse
except to note that his statement-‘Precisely because reality could be represented in particular ways
political decisions could be taken, troops and material moved and war fought’-evades the important
question of agency that I noted in my review essay. The assumption that it is representations that make
action possible is inadequate by itself. Political, military and economic structures, institutions, discursive
networks and leadership are all crucial in explaining social action and should be theorized together with
representational practices. Both here and earlier, Dalby’s reasoning inclines towards a form of idealism.
In response to Dalby’s fifth point (with its three subpoints), it is worth noting, first, that his book is about
the CPD, not the Reagan administration. He analyzes certain CPD discourses, root the geographical
reasoning practices of the Reagan administration nor its public-policy reasoning on national security.
Dalby’s book is narrowly textual; the general contextuality of the Reagan administration is not dealt
with. Second, let me simply note that I find that the distinction between critical theorists and poststructuralists is a little too rigidly and heroically drawn by Dalby and others. Third, Dalby’s interpretation
of the reconceptualization of national security in Moscow as heavily influenced by dissident peace
researchers in Europe is highly idealist, an interpretation that ignores the structural and ideological crises
facing the Soviet elite at that time. Gorbachev’s reforms and his new security discourse were also
strongly self- interested, an ultimately futile attempt to save the Communist Party and a discredited
regime of power from disintegration. The issues raised by Simon Dalby in his comment are important
ones for all those interested in the practice of critical geopolitics. While I agree with Dalby that questions
of discourse are extremely important ones for political geographers to engage, there is a danger of
fetishizing this concern with discourse so that we neglect the institutional and the sociological, the
materialist and the cultural, the political and the geographical contexts within which particular discursive
strategies become significant. Critical geopolitics, in other words, should not be a prisoner of the
sweeping ahistorical cant that sometimes accompanies ‘poststructuralism nor convenient reading
strategies like the identity politics narrative; it needs to always be open to the patterned mess that is
human history.
2ac – Policy FW – Debate Bad Ks
1. Claims are contingent – they must disprove each one and judge gets to choose
justifications because plan focus is good – key to fairness – otherwise the aff would
always lose.
2. Method focus fails – never results in action.
Fearon, Stanford Political Science Professor, and Wendt, Ohio State IR Professor,
2002
[James and Alexander, Handbook of International Relations, p. 68]
It should be stressed that in advocating a pragmatic view we are not endorsing method-driven social
science. Too much research in international relations chooses problems or things to be explained with
a view to whether the analysis will provide support for one or another methodological 'ism'. But the
point of IR scholarship should be to answer questions about international politics that are of great
normative concern, not to validate methods. Methods are means, not ends in themselves. As a matter
of personal scholarly choice it may be reasonable to stick with one method and see how far it takes us.
But since we do not know how far that is, if the goal of the discipline is insight into world politics then
it makes little sense to rule out one or the other approach on a priori grounds. In that case a method
indeed becomes a tacit ontology, which may lead to neglect of whatever problems it is poorly suited
to address. Being conscious about these choices is why it is important to distinguish between the
ontological, empirical, and pragmatic levels of the rationalist-constructivist debate. We favor the
pragmatic approach on heuristic grounds, but we certainly believe a conversation should continue on all
three levels.
2. We get to weigh case
a. Moots the 1ac – eliminates 9 minutes of aff offense and makes it impossible to be
aff
b. Implementation education – allowing us to weigh the case is key to test the
alternative against different advocacies
C. Switch side debate uniquely solves critical thinking through deliberation that
solves oppression.
Lundberg, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill communications professor,
2010
[Christian, Navigating Opportunity: Policy Debate in the 21st Century by Allan Louden, “Tradition of
Debate in North Carolina”
http://books.google.com/books?id=ntHxX_9J7gYC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q=complex%20w
orld&f=false, p.311-3]
The second major problem with the critique that identifies a naivety in articulating debate and democracy
is that is presumes that the primary pedagogical outcome of debate in speech capacities. But the
democratic capacities built by debate are not limited to speech – as indicated earlier, debate builds
capacity for critical thinking, analysis of public claims, informed decision making, and better public
judgment. If the picture of modern political life that underwrites this critique of debate is a pessimistic
view of increasingly labyrinthine and bureaucratic administrative politics, rapid scientific and
technological change outpacing the capacities of the citizenry to comprehend them, and ever-expanding
insular special-interest- and money-driven politics, it is a puzzling solution, at best, to argue that these
conditions warrant giving up on a debate. if democracy is open to rearticulation, it is open to
rearticulation precisely because as the challenges of modern political life proliferate, the citizenry’s
capacity can change, which is one of the primary reasons that theorists of democracy such as Dewey in
The Public and Its Problems place such a high premium on education (Dewey 1988, 63, 154). Debate
provides an indispensable form of education in the modern articulation of democracy because it builds
precisely the skills that allow the citizenry to research and be informed about policy decisions that impact
them, to sort through and evaluate the evidence for and relative merits of arguments for and against a
policy in an increasingly information-rich environment, and to prioritize their time and political energies
toward policies that matter the most to them.
The merits of debate as a tool for building democratic capacity-building take on a special significance in
the context of information literacy. John Larkin (2005, 140) argues that one of the primary failings of
modern colleges and universities is that they have not changed curriculum to match with the challenges of
a new information environment. This is a problem for the course of academic study in our current context,
but perhaps more important, argues Larkin, for the future of a citizenry that will need to make evaluative
choices against an increasingly complex and multimediated information environment (ibid.). Larkin’s
study tested the benefits of debate participation on information-literacy skills and concluded that in-class
debate participants reported significantly higher self-efficacy ratings of their ability to navigate academic
search databases and to effectively search and use other Web resources: To analyze the self-report ratings
of the instructional and control group students, we first conducted a multivariate analysis of variance on
all of the ratings, looking jointly at the effect of instruction/no instruction and debate topic…that it did not
matter which topic students had been assigned…students in the Instructional [debate] group were
significantly more confident in their ability to access information and less likely to feel that they needed
help to do so…These findings clearly indicate greater self-efficacy for online searching among students
who participated in [debate]…These results constitute strong support for the effectiveness of the project
on students’ self-efficacy for online searching in the academic databases. There was an unintended effect,
however: After doing…the project, instructional group students also felt more confident than the other
students in their ability to get good information from Yahoo and Google. It may be that the library
research experience increased self-efficacy for any searching, not just in academic databases. (Larkin
2005, 144) Larkin’s study substantiates Thomas Worthen and Gaylen Pack’s (1992, 3) claim that debate
in the college classroom plays a critical role in fostering the kind of problem-solving skills demanded by
the increasingly rich media and information environment of modernity. Though their essay was written in
1992 on the cusp of the eventual explosion of the Internet as a medium, Worthen and Pack’s framing of
the issue was prescient: the primary question facing today’s student has changed from how to best
research a topic to the crucial question of learning how to best evaluate which arguments to cite and rely
upon from an easily accessible and veritable cornucopia of materials. There are, without a doubt, a
number of important criticisms of employing debate as a model for democratic deliberation. But
cumulatively, the evidence presented here warrants strong support for expanding debate practice in the
classroom as a technology for enhancing democratic deliberative capacities. The unique combination of
critical-thinking skills, and capacities for listening and thoughtful, open engagement with hotly contested
issues argues for debate as a crucial component of a rich and vital democratic life. In-class debate practice
both aids students in achieving the best goals of college and university education and serves as an
unmatched practice for creating thoughtful, engaged, open-minded, and self-critical students who are
open to the possibilities of meaningful political engagement and new articulations of democratic life.
Expanding this practice is crucial, if only because the more we produce citizens who can actively and
effectively engage the political process, the more likely we are to produce revisions of democratic life
that are necessary if democracy is not only to survive, but to thrive and to deal with systemic threats
that risk our collective extinction. Democratic societies face a myriad of challenges, including: domestic
and international issues of class, gender, and racial justice; wholesale environmental destruction and the
potential for rapid climate change; emerging threats to international stability in the form of terrorism,
intervention, and new possibilities for great power conflicts; and increasing challenges of rapid
globalization, including an increasingly volatile global economic structure. More than any specific policy
or proposal, an informed and active citizenry that deliberates with greater skill and sensitivity provides
one of the best hopes for responsive and effective democratic governance, and by extension, one of the
last best hopes for dealing with the existential challenges to democracy in an increasingly complex world.
Given the challenge of perfecting our collective political skill, and in drawing on the best of our collective
creative intelligence, it is incumbent on us to both to make the case for and, more importantly, to do
concrete work to realize and expanded commitment to debate at colleges and universities.
D. The content of the debate is irrelevant – the process of debate teaches critical
thinking skills that break down dogmatic assumptions.
Lundberg, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill communications professor,
2010
[Christian, Navigating Opportunity: Policy Debate in the 21st Century by Allan Louden, “Tradition of
Debate in North Carolina”
http://books.google.com/books?id=ntHxX_9J7gYC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q=complex%20w
orld&f=false, p.295-6]
There is a strong theoretical and pedagogical rational for these findings. Alfred Snider and Max Schnurer
make the case for debate across the curriculum by arguing that “because debate teaches students to
evaluate evidence, to form their own opinions based on research rather than knee-jerk reactions,
and to present their views clearly and persuasively, it imparts skills that are useful in virtually any field of
study” (Snider and Schnurer 2002, 11). Perhaps more important, in their view, debate instills an ethos for
education this is both critical and cooperative, as they argue: “students work together in teams to prepare
their arguments, debate teaches the virtues of cooperation and, once the debate itself begins, friendly
competition” (ibid.). Kennedy argues that debate participation is one of the few college-level pedagogical
practices that forces an integration of the cognitive functions that define critical thinking (Kennedy 2007,
184). In Kennedy’s accounting, an all-too-common focus on the transmission of information in the form
of curricular content has worked at cross-purposes with cultivating the necessary skills in deliberation,
analysis, and evaluation that support critical thinking. Kennedy sees debate as one of the best alternatives
to embody a commitment to cultivating critical thinking. Citing critical-thinking theorists, she argues that
the real challenge is to move the pedagogical relationship with students from a focus on what to think to a
focus on how to think: Because debates require listeners and participants to evaluate competing choices
(Freeley and Steinberg 2005), they follow Vygotsky’s call for the type of social interaction that develops
higher-order psychological functions as well as critical thinking skills by moving up Bloom’s
Taxonomy….The lower order thinking skills of knowledge, comprehension, and application focus on rote
learning on what students should think, whereas the higher order thinking skills of analysis, synthesis, and
evaluation focus on how to think: “The short-term objective of acquiring knowledge should be
tempered with the long-term goal of training the mind to think analytically and critically: (Vo and
Morris 2006, 16). Instructional strategies such as debate and case studies are better suited to the
development of students’ higher order thinking skills than traditional instructional strategies such as
lecture (Roy and Macchiette 2005). Critical thinking skills used in a debate include defining the problem,
assessing the credibility of sources, identifying and challenging assumptions, recognizing inconsistencies,
and prioritizing the relevance and salience of various points within the overall argument. (Kenndy 2007,
185) Debate also holds promise in answering the second criticism of critical thinking in education,
namely, that “critical thinking” in the modern university is simply code for left-wing indoctrination. The
stakes in this claim are significant for the future of critical thinking in the academy, and more
significantly for the health of the academy itself. The idea that college education has become less about
developing a commitment to knowledge, inquiry, and analytical skill than a boot camp for ideological
indoctrination is a common theme. Often such arguments are marshaled in efforts to cut college and
university budgets (including research budgets), calls to eliminate tenure, and efforts to impose content
controls: the success of any of these measures would have significant implications for the health of the
academy, and, perhaps more important, for free academic inquiry. With a renewed commitment to debate,
colleges and universities would be able to say to their critics that they are doing everything possible to
create campus climates where students are educated, not indoctrinated, where argument from all sides
of our ideological divides are open to full, frank, and respectful discussion.
2ac – Vague Alts Bad
The alt is vague – that’s a reason to reject the team because it makes them a moving
target that we can’t test to determine if it is true, and vague alts fail.
Farber, City University of New York Brooklyn College political science professor, 913-12
[Samuel, “Occupy Wall Street and the Art of Demanding” http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/11507occupy-wall-street-and-the-art-of-demanding]
The OWS reluctance to formulate demands might have been beneficial initially in that it might have
created a more welcoming atmosphere to newly radicalized people. But as movements develop and
mature, they need to state more clearly what they stands for and not only what they stand against.
Movements need to develop some kind of theory to guide their actions, not as an obscure, technical body
of thought only accessible to the select few, but as the clearest possible ideas about the nature of the
enemy and of the movement. Movements must address the problems they are likely to confront as they go
from point A – where they are – to point B – where they want to be.
2ac – Floating Piks Bad
Floating piks are bad –
A. Moots all aff ground – makes it impossible to debate because there is no
offense that aff can generate
B. Infinitely regressive – justifies reading links to any word in the 1ac which is
impossible for the aff to defend
C. No stable text – makes the advocacy a moving target which means we can’t
rigorously test it
D. No solvency advocate – only reciprocal burden – not having a solvency
advocate means there is no comparative lit
E. Conditional floating piks are worse – the only answers are comparative – that
means they can kick the pic and extend our offense against us
F. Judge focus is key to fairness – any reason to vote aff is good enough – justifies
perm – do the alt
2ac – Utopian Alts Bad
Utopian alts are a voter for fairness and education because they have no
comparative literature and are impossible to rigorously test which makes it
impossible to be aff and precludes clash that generates critical thinking skills.
***Racism General***
Frontline – Race
Trends point toward greater equality – progress is slow and steady.
Beauchamp, Think Progress, 12-11-13
[Zack, “5 Reasons Why 2013 Was The Best Year In Human”
http://thinkprogress.org/security/2013/12/11/3036671/2013-certainly-year-human-history/]
Between the brutal civil war in Syria, the government shutdown and all of the deadly dysfunction it represents, the NSA spying revelations, and
massive inequality, it’d be easy to for you to enter 2014 thinking the last year has been an awful one.¶ But you’d be wrong. We have every
reason to believe that 2013
was, in fact, the best year on the planet for humankind.¶ Contrary to what you might have
heard, virtually all of the most important forces that determine what make people’s lives good — the things
that determine how long they live, and whether they live happily and freely — are trending in an extremely happy direction.
While it’s possible that this progress could be reversed by something like runaway climate change, the effects will
have to be dramatic to overcome the extraordinary and growing progress we’ve made in making the
world a better place.¶ Here’s the five big reasons why.¶ 1. Fewer people are dying young, and more are living
longer.¶ India Polio¶ CREDIT: AP PHOTO/MAHESH KUMAR¶ The greatest story in recent human history is the simplest:
we’re winning the fight against death. “There is not a single country in the world where infant or child
mortality today is not lower than it was in 1950,” writes Angus Deaton, a Princeton economist who
works on global health issues.¶ The most up-to-date numbers on global health, the 2013 World Health Organization (WHO)
statistical compendium, confirm Deaton’s estimation. Between 1990 and 2010, the percentage of children who died before their fifth
birthday dropped by almost half. Measles deaths declined by 71 percent, and both tuberculosis and maternal deaths by half again. HIV, that
modern plague, is also being held back, with deaths from AIDS-related illnesses down by 24 percent since 2005.¶ In short, fewer people are
dying untimely deaths. And that’s
not only true in rich countries: life expectancy has gone up between 1990 and
2011 in every WHO income bracket. The gains are even more dramatic if you take the long view: global life expectancy was 47 in
the early 1950s, but had risen to 70 — a 50 percent jump — by 2011. For even more perspective, the average Briton in 1850 — when the British
Empire had reached its apex — was 40. The average person today should expect to live almost twice as long as the average citizen of the
world’s wealthiest and most powerful country in 1850.¶ In real terms, this means millions of fewer dead adults and children a year, millions
fewer people who spend their lives suffering the pains and unfreedoms imposed by illness, and millions more people spending their twilight
years with loved ones. And the trends are all positive — “progress has accelerated in recent years in many countries with the highest rates of
mortality,” as the WHO rather bloodlessly put it.¶ What’s going on? Obviously, it’s fairly complicated, but the
most important drivers
have been technological and political innovation. The Enlightenment-era advances in the scientific
method got people doing high-quality research, which brought us modern medicine and the information
technologies that allow us to spread medical breakthroughs around the world at increasingly faster
rates. Scientific discoveries also fueled the Industrial Revolution and the birth of modern capitalism,
giving us more resources to devote to large-scale application of live-saving technologies. And the global
spread of liberal democracy made governments accountable to citizens, forcing them to attend to their
health needs or pay the electoral price.¶ We’ll see the enormously beneficial impact of these two forces, technology and
democracy, repeatedly throughout this list, which should tell you something about the foundations of human progress. But when talking about
improvements in health, we shouldn’t neglect foreign aid. Nations donating huge amounts of money out of an altruistic interest in the welfare
of foreigners is historically unprecedented, and while not all aid has been helpful, health aid has been a huge boon.¶ Even Deaton, who wrote
one of 2013′s harshest assessments of foreign aid, believes “the case for assistance to fight disease such as HIV/AIDS or smallpox is strong.”
That’s because these programs have demonstrably saved lives — the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), a 2003 program
pushed by President Bush, paid for anti-retroviral treatment for over 5.1 million people in the poor countries hardest-hit by the AIDS epidemic.¶
So we’re
outracing the Four Horseman, extending our lives faster than pestilence, war, famine, and death can take them. That
alone should be enough to say the world is getting better.¶ 2. Fewer people suffer from extreme
poverty, and the world is getting happier.¶ APTOPIX India Maha Kumbh¶ CREDIT: SAURABH DAS/AP PHOTO¶ There are
fewer people in abject penury than at any other point in human history, and middle class people enjoy
their highest standard of living ever. We haven’t come close to solving poverty: a number of African countries in
particular have chronic problems generating growth, a nut foreign aid hasn’t yet cracked. So this
isn’t a call for complacency about
poverty any more than acknowledging victories over disease is an argument against tackling malaria. But make no mistake: as a
whole, the world is much richer in 2013 than it was before.¶ 721 million fewer people lived in extreme
poverty ($1.25 a day) in 2010 than in 1981, according to a new World Bank study from October. That’s
astounding — a decline from 40 to about 14 percent of the world’s population suffering from abject
want. And poverty rates are declining in every national income bracket: even in low income countries, the
percentage of people living in extreme poverty ($1.25 a day in 2005 dollars) a day gone down from 63 in 1981 to 44 in 2010.¶ We can be fairly
confident that these trends are continuing. For one thing, they survived the Great Recession in 2008. For another, the decline in poverty has
been fueled by global economic growth, which looks to be continuing: global GDP grew by 2.3 percent in 2012, a number that’ll rise to 2.9
percent in 2013 according to IMF projections.¶ The bulk of the recent decline in poverty comes form India and China — about 80 percent from
China *alone*. Chinese economic and social reform, a delayed reaction to the mass slaughter and starvation of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, has
been the engine of poverty’s global decline. If you subtract China, there are actually more poor people today than there were in 1981
(population growth trumping the percentage declines in poverty).¶ But we shouldn’t discount China. If what we care about is fewer people
suffering the misery of poverty, then it shouldn’t matter what nation the less-poor people call home. Chinese growth should be celebrated, not
shunted aside.¶ The
poor haven’t been the only people benefitting from global growth. Middle class people
have access to an ever-greater stock of life-improving goods. Televisions and refrigerators, once luxury goods, are now
comparatively cheap and commonplace. That’s why large-percentage improvements in a nation’s GDP appear to correlate strongly with higher
levels of happiness among the nation’s citizens; people like having things that make their lives easier and more worry-free.¶ Global economic
growth in the past five decades has dramatically reduced poverty and made people around the world happier. Once again, we’re better off.¶
3. War is becoming rarer and less deadly.¶ APTOPIX Mideast Libya¶ CREDIT: AP PHOTO/ MANU BRABO¶ Another massive
conflict could overturn the global progress against disease and poverty. But it appears war, too, may be losing its fangs.¶ Steven Pinker’s
2011 book The Better Angels Of Our Nature is the gold standard in this debate. Pinker brought a treasure trove of
data to bear on the question of whether the world has gotten more peaceful, and found that, in the long arc of
human history, both war and other forms of violence (the death penalty, for instance) are on a
centuries-long downward slope.¶ Pinker summarizes his argument here if you don’t own the book. Most eye-popping are
the numbers for the past 50 years; Pinker finds that “the worldwide rate of death from interstate and
civil war combined has juddered downward…from almost 300 per 100,000 world population during
World War II, to almost 30 during the Korean War, to the low teens during the era of the Vietnam War,
to single digits in the 1970s and 1980s, to less than 1 in the twenty-first century.” Here’s what that looks like
graphed:¶ Pinker¶ CREDIT: STEVEN PINKER/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL¶ So it looks like the smallest percentage of humans alive
since World War II, and in all likelihood in human history, are living through the horrors of war. Did 2013 give us any reason
to believe that Pinker and the other scholars who agree with him have been proven wrong?¶ Probably not. The academic debate over the
decline of war really exploded in 2013, but the “declinist” thesis has fared pretty well. Challenges
to Pinker’s conclusion that battle
deaths have gone down over time have not withstood scrutiny. The most compelling critique, a new paper by Bear F. Braumoeller,
argues that if you control for the larger number of countries in the last 50 years, war happens at roughly the same rates as it has historically.¶
There are lots of things you might say about Braumoeller’s argument, and I’ve asked Pinker for his two cents (update: Pinker’s response here).
But most importantly, if battle deaths per 100,000 people really has declined, then his argument doesn’t mean very much. If
(percentagewise) fewer people are dying from war, then what we call “war” now is a lot less deadly than “war” used
to be. Braumoeller suggests population growth and improvements in battle medicine explain the decline, but that’s not convincing: tell me
with a straight face that the only differences in deadliness between World War II, Vietnam, and the wars you see today is that there are more
people and better doctors.¶ There’s a more rigorous way of putting that: today,
we see many more civil wars than we do
wars between nations. The former tend to be less deadly than the latter. That’s why the other major challenge to Pinker’s
thesis in 2013, the deepening of the Syrian civil war, isn’t likely to upset the overall trend. Syria’s war is an unimaginable
tragedy, one responsible for the rare, depressing increase in battle deaths from 2011 to 2012. However, the overall 2011-2012 trend
“fits well with the observed long-term decline in battle deaths,” according to researchers at the
authoritative Uppsala Conflict Data Program, because the uptick is not enough to suggest an overall
change in trend. We should expect something similar when the 2013 numbers are published.¶ Why are smaller and smaller percentages
of people being exposed to the horrors of war? There are lots of reasons one could point to, but two of the biggest ones are the spread of
democracy and humans getting, for lack of a better word, better.¶ That democracies never, or almost never, go to war with each other is not
seriously in dispute: the statistical evidence is ridiculously strong. While some argue that the “democratic peace,” as it’s called, is caused by
things other than democracy itself, there’s
good experimental evidence that democratic leaders and citizens just
don’t want to fight each other.¶ Since 1950, democracy has spread around the world like wildfire. There
were only a handful of democracies after World War II, but that grew to roughly 40 percent of all by the end of the Cold War. Today, a
comfortable majority — about 60 percent — of all states are democracies. This freer world is also a safer one.¶ Second — and this is Pinker’s
preferred explanation — people have developed strategies for dealing with war’s causes and consequences. “Human ingenuity and experience
have gradually been brought to bear,” Pinker writes, “just as they have chipped away at hunger and disease.” A series of human inventions,
things like U.N. peacekeeping operations, which nowadays are very successful at reducing violence, have given us a set of social tools
increasingly well suited to reducing the harm caused by armed conflict.¶ War’s decline isn’t accidental, in other words. It’s by design.¶
4.
Rates of murder and other violent crimes are in free-fall.¶ Britain Unrest¶ CREDIT: AKIRA SUEMORI/AP PHOTOS¶
Pinker’s trend against violence isn’t limited just to war. It seems likes crimes, both of the sort states
commit against their citizens and citizens commit against each other, are also on the decline.¶ Take a few
examples. Slavery, once commonly sanctioned by governments, is illegal everywhere on earth. The use of torture as legal
punishment has gone down dramatically. The European murder rate fell 35-fold from the Middle Ages to
the beginning of the 20th century (check out this amazing 2003 paper from Michael Eisner, who dredged up medieval records to
estimate European homicide rates in the swords-and-chivalry era, if you don’t believe me).¶ The decline has been especially marked in recent
years. Though homicide crime rates climbed back up from their historic lows between the 1970s and 1990s, reversing progress made since the
late 19th century, they have collapsed worldwide in the 21st century. 557,000
people were murdered in 2001 — almost
three times as many as were killed in war that year. In 2008, that number was 289,000, and the
homicide rate has been declining in 75 percent of nations since then.¶ Statistics from around the developed world,
where numbers are particularly reliable, show that it’s not just homicide that’s on the wane: it’s almost all violent
crime. US government numbers show that violent crime in the United States declined from a peak of about 750 crimes per 100,000
Americans to under 450 by 2009. G7 as a whole countries show huge declines in homicide, robbery, and vehicle theft.¶ So even in countries
that aren’t at poor or at war, most people’s lives are getting safer and more secure. Why?¶ We know it’s not incarceration. While the United
States and Britain have dramatically increased their prison populations, others, like Canada, the Netherlands, and Estonia, reduced their
incarceration rates and saw similar declines in violent crime. Same thing state-to-state in the United States; New York imprisoned fewer people
and saw the fastest crime decline in the country.¶ The Economist’s deep dive into the explanations for crime’s collapse provides a few answers.
Globally, police have gotten better at working with communities and targeting areas with the most crime. They’ve also gotten new toys, like
DNA testing, that make it easier to catch criminals.¶ The crack epidemic in the United States and its heroin twin in Europe have both slowed
down dramatically. Rapid gentrification has made inner-city crime harder. And the increasing cheapness of “luxury” goods like iPods and DVD
players has reduced incentives for crime on both the supply and demand sides: stealing a DVD player isn’t as profitable, and it’s easier for a
would-be thief to buy one in the first place.¶ But there’s one explanation The Economist dismissed that strikes me as hugely important: the
abolition of lead gasoline. Kevin
Drum at Mother Jones wrote what’s universally acknowledged to be the
definitive argument for the lead/crime link, and it’s incredibly compelling. We know for a fact that lead
exposure damages people’s brains and can potentially be fatal; that’s why an international campaign to
ban leaded gasoline started around 1970. Today, leaded gasoline is almost unheard of — it’s banned in 175
countries, and there’s been a decline in lead blood levels by about 90 percent.¶ Drum marshals a wealth of evidence that the
parts of the brain damaged by lead are the same ones that check people’s aggressive impulses. Moreover,
the timing matches up: crime shot up in the mid-to-late-20th century as cars spread around the world, and started to decline in the 70s as the
anti-lead campaign was succeeding. Here’s close the relationship is, using data from the United States:¶ Lead_Crime_325¶ Now, non-homicide
violent crime appears to have ticked up in 2012, based on U.S. government surveys of victims of crime, but it’s
very possible that’s
just a blip: the official Department of Justice report says up-front that “the apparent increase in the rate of violent crimes reported to police
from 2011 to 2012 was not statistically significant.Ӧ So we have no reason to believe crime is making a come back, and every reason to believe
the historical decline in criminal violence is here to stay.¶
5. There’s less racism, sexism, and other forms of
discrimination in the world.¶ Nelson Mandela¶ CREDIT: THEANA CALITZ/AP IMAGES¶ Racism, sexism, anti-Semitism,
homophobia, and other forms of discrimination remain, without a doubt, extraordinarily powerful
forces. The statistical and experimental evidence is overwhelming — this irrefutable proof of widespread discrimination against AfricanAmericans, for instance, should put the “racism is dead” fantasy to bed.¶ Yet the need to combat discrimination denial shouldn’t blind us to
the good news. Over the centuries, humanity has made extraordinary progress in taming its hate for and ill-
treatment of other humans on the basis of difference alone. Indeed, it is very likely that we live in the
least discriminatory era in the history of modern civilization. It’s not a huge prize given how bad the past
had been, but there are still gains worth celebrating.¶ Go back 150 years in time and the point should be
obvious. Take four prominent groups in 1860: African-Americans were in chains, European Jews were routinely
massacred in the ghettos and shtetls they were confined to, women around the world were denied the opportunity to work outside the home
and made almost entirely subordinate to their husbands, and LGBT people were invisible. The improvements in each of these group’s statuses
today, both in the United States and internationally, are incontestable. ¶ On closer look, we
have reason to believe the happy
trends are likely to continue. Take racial discrimination. In 2000, Harvard sociologist Lawrence Bobo
penned a comprehensive assessment of the data on racial attitudes in the United States. He found a
“national consensus” on the ideals of racial equality and integration. “A nation once comfortable as a
deliberately segregationist and racially discriminatory society has not only abandoned that view,” Bobo
writes, “but now overtly positively endorses the goals of racial integration and equal treatment. There is
no sign whatsoever of retreat from this ideal, despite events that many thought would call it into
question. The magnitude, steadiness, and breadth of this change should be lost on no one.Ӧ The norm
against overt racism has gone global. In her book on the international anti-apartheid movement in the 1980s, Syracuse’s Audie
Klotz says flatly that “the illegitimacy of white minority rule led to South Africa’s persistent diplomatic, cultural, and economic isolation.” The
belief that racial discrimination could not be tolerated had become so widespread, Klotz argues, that it united the globe — including
governments that had strategic interests in supporting South Africa’s whites — in opposition to apartheid. In 2011, 91 percent of respondents
in a sample of 21 diverse countries said that equal treatment of people of different races or ethnicities was important to them.¶ Racism
obviously survived both American and South African apartheid, albeit in more subtle, insidious forms.
“The death of Jim Crow racism has left us in an uncomfortable place,” Bobo writes, “a state of laissez-faire racism” where racial discrimination
and disparities still exist, but support for the kind of aggressive government policies needed to address them is racially polarized. But
there’s reason to hope that’ll change as well: two massive studies of the political views of younger
Americans by my TP Ideas colleagues, John Halpin and Ruy Teixeira, found that millenials were
significantly more racially tolerant and supportive of government action to address racial disparities
than the generations that preceded them. Though I’m not aware of any similar research of on a global scale, it’s hard not to
imagine they’d find similar results, suggesting that we should have hope that the power of racial prejudice may be waning.¶ The story
about gender discrimination is very similar: after the feminist movement’s enormous victories in the
20th century, structural sexism still shapes the world in profound ways, but the cause of gender equality
is making progress. In 2011, 86 percent of people in a diverse 21 country sample said that equal
treatment on the basis of gender was an important value. The U.N.’s Human Development Report’s
Gender Inequality Index — a comprehensive study of reproductive health, social empowerment, and
labor market equity — saw a 20 percent decline in observable gender inequalities from 1995 to 2011.
IMF data show consistent global declines in wage disparities between genders, labor force participation, and
educational attainment around the world. While enormous inequality remains, 2013 is looking to be the worst year for sexism in history.¶
Finally, we’ve made astonishing progress on sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination —
largely in the past 15 years. At the beginning of 2003, zero Americans lived in marriage equality states;
by the end of 2013, 38 percent of Americans will. Article 13 of the European Community Treaty bans discrimination on the
grounds of sexual orientation, and, in 2011, the UN Human Rights Council passed a resolution committing the council to documenting and
exposing discrimination on orientation or identity grounds around the world. The public
opinion trends are positive
worldwide: all of the major shifts from 2007 to 2013 in Pew’s “acceptance of homosexuality” poll were
towards greater tolerance, and young people everywhere are more open to equality for LGBT individuals than their older peers.¶
best_year_graphics-04¶ Once again, these victories are partial and by no means inevitable. Racism, sexism,
homophobia, and other forms of discrimination aren’t just “going away” on their own. They’re losing
their hold on us because people are working to change other people’s minds and because governments
are passing laws aimed at promoting equality. Positive trends don’t mean the problems are close to
solved, and certainly aren’t excuses for sitting on our hands.¶ That’s true of everything on this list. The fact that fewer people are dying from
war and disease doesn’t lessen the moral imperative to do something about those that are; the fact that people are getting richer and safer in
their homes isn’t an excuse for doing more to address poverty and crime.¶ But too often, the worst parts about the world are treated as
inevitable, the prospect of radical victory over pain and suffering dismissed as utopian fantasy. The overwhelming force of the evidence shows
that to be false. As best we can tell, the reason humanity is getting better is because humans have decided to make the world a better place.
We consciously chose to develop lifesaving medicine and build freer political systems; we’ve passed laws against workplace discrimination and
poisoning children’s minds with lead.¶ So far, these choices have more than paid off. It’s up to us to make sure they continue to.
Using the state strategically is critical to fighting racism and solves the link to their
ethics impact.
Smith, Associate Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at UC Riverside, 12
(Andrea, “The Moral Limits of the Law: Settler Colonialism and the Anti-Violence Movement,” settler
colonial studies 2, 2 (2012) Special Issue: Karangatia: Calling Out Gender and Sexuality in Settler
Societies, http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/2201473X.2012.10648842)
Given the logics of settler colonialism, it may seem to be a hopeless contradiction to work within the
US legal system at all. In fact, many social justice advocates eschew engaging in legal reform for this
reason. Consequently, we are often presented with two dichotomous choices: short-term legal reform
that addresses immediate needs but further invests us in the current colonial system or long-term
anti-colonial organising that attempts to avoid the political contradictions of short-term strategies
but does not necessarily focus on immediate needs. This essay will explore possibilities for rethinking
this dichotomous approach by rethinking the role of legal reform in general. The essay foregrounds
alternative approaches using a Native feminist analytic towards engaging legal reform that may
have a greater potential to undo the logics of settler colonialism from within. As I have argued
elsewhere, Native feminism as well as Native studies is not limited in its object of analysis.5 Rather, in its
interest in addressing the intersecting logics of heteropatriarchy and settler colonialism, it is free to
engage with diverse materials. In looking then towards alternative strategies for undoing settler
colonialism through the law, I contend that it is important to engage important work that might not seem
to be directly about Native peoples or settler colonialism if this work helps provide new resources for how
we could strategically engage the law. Consequently, I engage the work of legal scholars and activists that
address very different areas of law as a means to challenge some of the current assumptions that
undergird both reformist and revolutionary approaches to the law. DECOLONIAL REALISM Critical
race theorist Derrick Bell challenged the presupposition of much racial justice legal reform
strategies when he argued that racism is a permanent feature of society. While his work is generally
cited as a critical race theoretical approach, I would contend that his work implicitly suggests a settler
colonial framework for understanding legal reform. That is, many of the heirs of Derrick Bell do not
follow the logical consequences of his work and argue for an approach to race and the law that
seeks racial representation in the law.6 However, Bell’s analysis points to the inherent
contradictions to such an approach. Rather than seeking representation, Bell calls on Black peoples
to ‘acknowledge the permanence of our subordinate status’.7 Espousing the framework of ‘racial
realism’, Bell disavows any possibility of ‘transcendent change’.8 To the contrary, he argues that ‘[i]t
is time we concede that a commitment to racial equality merely perpetuates our disempowerment’.9
The alternative he advocates is resistance for its own sake – living ‘to harass white folks’ – or shortterm pragmatic strategies that focus less on eliminating racism and more on simply ensuring that
we do not ‘worsen conditions for those we are trying to help’.10 While Bell does not elaborate on
what those strategies may be, he points to a different kind of reasoning that could be utilised for legal
reform. In his famous story, ‘Space Traders’, aliens come to planet Earth promising to solve the
world’s problems if world leaders will simply give up Black people to the aliens. This story
narratively illustrates how thin white liberal commitments to social justice are. First, the white people of
course do give up Black people to the aliens without much thought. But what more dramatically
illustrates this point is that the reader knows that, almost without a doubt, if this were to happen in real
life, of course Black people would be given up. Within this story, however, is a little-commented scene
that speaks to perhaps a different way to approach legal reform within the context of white
supremacy. Gleason Golightly, a conservative black economics professor who serves as an informal
cabinet member for the President, becomes embroiled in a fight with the civil rights legal
establishment about the best means to oppose the proposed trade. Golightly had previously pleaded
with the President and his cabinet to reject it. When his pleas are not heard, he begins to reflect on
how his support for conservative racial policies in the interests of attaining greater political power
had been to no avail. He realises the strategy behind his appeal to the President was doomed to fail. In
retrospect, though [his] arguments were based on morality […] [i]nstead of outsmarting them,
Golightly had done what he so frequently criticised civil rights spokespersons for doing: he had
tried to get whites to do right by black people because it was right that they do so. ‘Crazy!’ he
commented when civil rights people did it. ‘Crazy!’ he mumbled to himself, at himself.11 Realising the
error of his ways, Golightly interrupts this civil rights meeting in which activists plan to organise a
moral crusade to convince white Americans to reject the space traders proposal. Instead, he
suggests that they should tell white people that they cannot wait to go on the ship because they have
learned they are being transported to a land of milk and honey. White people, argues Golightly, so
oppose policies that benefit Black people, even if they benefit white people, that they will start
litigating to stop the space traders’ proposed plan.12 The civil rights establishment rejects this
strategy as a moral outrage and begins a racial justice campaign, ultimately to no avail. What this
story troubles is social justice movements’ investment in the morality of the law. Despite the US
legal system’s complicity in settler colonialism, patriarchy, capitalism and white supremacy since
its inception, they advocate strategies for change that rest on the presupposition that the law can
somehow be made to support the end of sexism, racism and classism. Historically, as more radical
racial and social justice organisations were either crushed or co-opted by the US governments
during the 1970s, these movements shifted from a focus on a radical restructuring of the political
and economic system to a focus on articulating identity based claims that did not necessarily
challenge the prevailing power structure.13 If groups were not going to directly challenge the state,
they could then call on the state to recognise their claims to equality and redress from harms
perpetrated by other social actors. Ironically, then, the same US government that codified slavery,
segregation, anti-immigrant racism, and the genocide of indigenous peoples, now becomes the body
that will protect people of colour from racism. The fact that the US itself could not exist without the
past and continuing genocide of indigenous peoples in particular does not strike liberal legal reformists as
a contradiction. Bell suggests that it may be possible to engage in legal reform in the midst of these
contradictions if one foregoes the fantasy that the law is morally benevolent or even neutral. In
doing so, more possibilities for strategic engagement emerge. For instance, in the ‘Racial Preference
Licensing Act’, Bell suggests that rather than criminalise racial discrimination, the government
should allow discrimination, but tax it. Taxes accrued from this discrimination would then go into
an ‘equality’ fund that would support the educational and economic interests of AfricanAmericans.14 As I have argued elsewhere, the law enforcement approach has been similarly limited in
addressing the issues of gender violence when the majority of men do, or express willingness to engage
in, it.15 As a result, criminalisation has not actually led to a decrease in violence against women.16 Antiviolence activists and scholars have widely critiqued the supposed efficacy of criminalisation.17 As I will
discuss later in this essay, Native women in particular have struggled with the contradictions of engaging
the legal system to address the legacies of colonial gender violence. While there is growing critique
around criminalisation as the primary strategy for addressing gender violence, there has not been
attention to what other frameworks could be utilised for addressing gender violence. In particular, what
would happen if we pursued legal strategies based on their strategic effects rather than based on
the moral statements they propose to make?
EXTN – Uniqueness – Race
World is getting better – 2013 was the best year on the planet – every metric goes
[insert side], people are living longer, less people are experiencing war, the world is
richer, and discrimination on the basis of race is decreasing – studies demonstrate
attitudes are changing – that’s Beauchamp. Prefer it – our ev takes into account
their args – their ev cites snapshots, our cites trends and has recency.
There is progress in alleviating racial inequality – pragmatic and targeted reforms
are able to be materially beneficial.
Feldscher, Harvard School of Public Health, 9-19-13
[Karen, “Progress, but challenges in reducing racial disparities,”
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/features/progress-but-challenges-in-reducing-racial-disparities/]
Disparities between blacks and whites in the U.S. remain pronounced—and health is no exception. A panel of
experts at Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) discussed these disparities—what they are, why they persist,
and what to do about them—at a September 12, 2013 event titled “Dialogue on Race, Justice, and Public Health.”¶ The event was held in Kresge
G-1 and featured panelists Lisa Coleman, Harvard University’s chief diversity officer; David Williams, Florence Sprague Norman and Laura
Smart Norman Professor of Public Health in the HSPH Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences; Chandra Jackson, Yerby Postdoctoral
Research Fellow in the HSPH Department of Nutrition; and Zinzi Bailey, a fifth-year doctoral student in the HSPH Department of Social and
Behavioral Sciences. Robert Blendon, Richard L. Menschel Professor of Public Health and Professor of Health Policy and Political Analysis at
HSPH, moderated the discussion.¶ Gains, but pains¶ Health care disparities are troubling, Coleman said. One study found that doctors
recommended coronary revascularization—bypass surgery that replaces blocked blood vessels with new ones—among white patients with heart
disease 50% of the time, but just 23% of the time for blacks. Black women are less likely to be given a bone marrow density test than white
women, even when it’s known they’ve had prior fractures. And the black infant mortality rate is 2.3 times higher than that of non-Hispanic
whites.¶ Each
speaker acknowledged that racial minorities have made significant gains over the past halfcentury, but said there is much more work still to do. They cited statistics providing stark evidence of
continuing disparities in health, wealth, education, income, arrest and incarceration rates, foreclosure
rates, and poverty. Coleman called the data “disconcerting; in some cases, alarming.”¶ Schools are desegregated, she said, but not
integrated; median income is $50,000 per year for whites but $31,000 a year for blacks and $37,000 a year for Hispanics; since the 1960s, the
unemployment rate among blacks has been two to two-and-a-half times higher than for whites; and one in three black men can expect to spend
time in prison during their lifetimes.¶ Blendon shared results from surveys that accentuate sharp differences of opinion about how well blacks are
faring in the U.S. For instance, in a survey that asked participants if they thought that the lives of black Americans had changed dramatically over
the past 50 years, 54% of whites said yes but only 29% of blacks did. Another survey asked whether or not people approved of the verdict in the
George Zimmerman trial; 51% of whites approved but only 9% of blacks did. ¶ Reducing disparities through research, education¶ Jackson talked
about growing up in a segregated neighborhood in Atlanta and attending a school with 99% black students and inadequate resources. She became
the first in her family to attend college. Now, through her research, she hopes to expose and reduce racial health disparities. In a recent study in
the American Journal of Epidemiology, Jackson and colleagues reported that blacks—particularly black professionals—get less sleep than whites,
which can have potentially negative impacts on health.¶ Bailey
discussed what’s known as the “school-to-prison
pipeline”—a trajectory in which black teens do poorly in school, get held back a grade, drop out, commit a crime, then end up in jail. On the
flip side, she said, there are “diversity pipelines” to recruit minority students into higher education. “Often these programs target
students who have already avoided the school-to-prison pipeline,” Bailey said, noting that she would like to see higher education institutions
connect with black students at earlier ages to steer them toward positive choices.¶ Williams
said continuing disparities between
whites and minorities are by-products of lingering racial prejudice that is deeply embedded in American
society. He cited a study of popular U.S. television shows that found many black actors on the shows—something to celebrate—but also much
more negative nonverbal behavior directed toward black actors than white ones. Another study, analyzing common pairings of words in
American culture, found the words most frequently paired with the word “black” included “poor,” “violent,” “lazy,” and “dangerous.” Other
research has uncovered widely pervasive “aversive racism,” in which people who have sympathy for the injustices blacks have experienced in the
past nevertheless, as “normal” Americans, hold negative implicit biases against them.¶ Near the end of the event, Jackson stressed the importance
of getting people to understand why they should care about inequities. “By 2040, this country will be a majority of minorities,” she said. “And,
even if you don’t care from a moral standpoint, if we [as a country] take on the health profile of minorities in this country, we’re in trouble
economically.”
EXTN – Links – Racism
Rejecting the state in every instance is too sweeping and becomes self-fulfilling –
reformism has tangible benefits.
Clark, Catholic University law professor, 1995
[Leroy, 73 Denv. U.L. Rev. 23, “ARTICLE: A Critique of Professor Derrick A. Bell's Thesis of the
Permanence of Racism and His Strategy of Confrontation” Lexis]
A Final Word¶ Despite Professor Bell's prophecy of doom, I believe he would like to have his analysis
proven wrong. However, he desperately leans on a tactic from the past--laying out the disabilities of the
black condition and accusing whites of not having the moral strength to act fairly. That is the ultimate
theme in both of his books and in much of his law review writing. That tactic not only lacks full force
against today's complex society, it also becomes, for many whites, an exaggerated claim that racism is the
sole cause of black misfortunes. n146 Many whites may feel about the black condition what many of us
may have felt about the homeless: dismayed, but having no clear answer as to how the problem is to be
solved, and feeling individually powerless if the resolution calls for massive resources that we,
personally, lack. Professor Bell's two books may confirm this sense of powerlessness in whites with a
limited background in this subject, because Professor Bell does not offer a single programmatic approach
toward changing the circumstance of blacks. He presents only startling, unanalyzed prophecies of doom,
which will easily garner attention from a controversy-hungry media. n147¶ It is much harder to exercise
imagination to create viable strategies for change. n148 Professor Bell sensed the despair that the average-especially average black--reader would experience, so he put forth rhetoric urging an "unremitting
struggle that leaves no room for giving up." n149 His contention is ultimately hollow, given the total
sweep of his work.¶ At some point it becomes dysfunctional to refuse giving any credit to the very
positive abatements of racism that occurred with white support, and on occasion, white leadership.
Racism thrives in an atmosphere of insecurity, apprehension about the future, and inter-group
resentments. Unrelenting, unqualified accusations only add to that negative atmosphere. Empathetic and
more generous responses are possible in an atmosphere of support, security, and a sense that advancement
is possible; the greatest progress of blacks occurred during the 1960s and early 1970s when the economy
was expanding. Professor Bell's "analysis" is really only accusation and "harassing white folks," and is
undermining and destructive. There is no love--except for his own group--and there is a constricted reach
for an understanding of whites. There is only rage and perplexity. No bridges are built--only
righteousness is being sold.¶ A people, black or white, are capable only to the extent they believe they are.
Neither I, nor Professor Bell, have a crystal ball, but I do know that creativity and a drive for change are
very much linked to a belief that they are needed, and to a belief that they can make a difference. The
future will be shaped by past conditions and the actions of those over whom we have no control. Yet it is
not fixed; it will also be shaped by the attitudes and energy with which we face the future. Writing about
race is to engage in a power struggle. It is a non-neutral political act, and one must take responsibility for
its consequences. Telling whites that they are irremediably racist is not mere "information"; it is a force
that helps create the future it predicts. If whites believe the message, feelings of futility could overwhelm
any further efforts to seek change. I am encouraged, however, that the motto of the most articulate black
spokesperson alive today, Jesse Jackson, is, "Keep hope alive!" and that much of the strength of Martin
Luther King, Jr. was his capacity to "dream" us toward a better place.
Progress is possible – ending slavery and civil rights prove – the quality of plans are
key which demonstrates the importance of decision-making.
Clark, Catholic University law professor, 1995
[Leroy, 73 Denv. U.L. Rev. 23, “ARTICLE: A Critique of Professor Derrick A. Bell's Thesis of the
Permanence of Racism and His Strategy of Confrontation” Lexis]
The History of Black Progress¶ I must now address the thesis that there has been no evolutionary progress
for blacks in America. Professor Bell concludes that blacks improperly read history if we believe, as
Americans in general believe, that progress--racial, in the case of blacks--is "linear and evolutionary." n49
According to Professor Bell, the "American dogma of automatic progress" has never applied to blacks.
n50 Blacks will never gain full equality, and "even those herculean efforts we hail as successful will
produce no more than temporary 'peaks of progress,' short-lived victories that slide into irrelevance." n51¶
Progress toward reducing racial discrimination and subordination has never been "automatic," if that
refers to some natural and inexorable process without struggle. Nor has progress ever been strictly
"linear" in terms of unvarying year by year improvement, because the combatants on either side of the
equality struggle have varied over time in their energies, resources, capacities, and the quality of their
plans. Moreover, neither side could predict or control all of the variables which accompany progress or
non-progress; some factors, like World War II, occurred in the international arena, and were not
exclusively under American control.¶ With these qualifications, and a long view of history, blacks and
their white allies achieved two profound and qualitatively different leaps forward toward the goal of
equality: the end of slavery, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Moreover, despite open and, lately, covert
resistance, black progress has never been shoved back, in a qualitative sense, to the powerlessness and
abuse of periods preceding these leaps forward. n52¶ The First Qualitative Leap¶ For two-thirds of
American history, African-Americans were, as a matter of law and practice, the property of white slaveholders from birth until death. Professor Bell commented on the ending of this institution: "Two centuries
after the Constitution's adoption, we did live in a far more enlightened world. Slavery was no more." n53¶
That must be the most tepid understatement ever about the ending of the most violent and debasing
condition that blacks ever suffered in this country. Slaves worked six and sometimes seven days a week.
Idle slaves could be flogged, and some were maimed after a failed escape. Families were separated, and
black females were forced into sexual concubinage. Slaves owned nothing, their movement was strictly
circumscribed, and they were kept illiterate as another form of control. n54¶ Ending this degrading
institution was a profound qualitative leap toward freedom, and it was never reversed. White southerners
did regain control of the legislatures, and imposed racial segregation. Racial segregation, however, was a
far cry from the total domination of slavery. Moreover, blacks seized the opportunity to take many steps,
within the confines of segregation, that became the seeds of the next great leap forward into freedom in
the 1950s and 1960s. The newly freed blacks trekked North and West--not an option under slavery--and
there gained critical political leverage. n55 Independent black churches, possible only after the Civil War,
developed a debate between a conservative wing concerned with the hereafter, and a more progressive
wing that sought to use the church as an agency for ameliorating the constrictions in black life. n56 From
the latter, one Martin Luther King sprang forth, galvanizing blacks and the whole nation for the next leap
towards freedom.¶ During Reconstruction, black legislators established a free public school system. Even
though whites imposed segregation on the public schools, they did not abolish them. By 1900, 1.5 million
black children were overcoming the illiteracy imposed on their parents and grandparents in slavery. n57¶
Shortly after the imposition of racial segregation, blacks turned to the United States Supreme Court for
relief from its legal strictures. There were losses at first, the most notable being Plessy v. Ferguson, n58
upholding racial segregation under the "separate but equal" doctrine. As blacks gained more
organizational sophistication, the Court, gradually but progressively, struck down segregation in voting,
n59 in housing, n60 and in graduate schools. n61 The culmination was Brown v. Board of Education, n62
which fully repudiated the Plessy doctrine and held that state sanctioned racial segregation violated the
14th Amendment.¶ Second Qualitative Leap Forward¶ The black-led, and white-supported, civil rights
movement gathered momentum in the late 1950s and early 1960s through marches, "sit-ins"--which
breached racial segregation in public establishments--and the development of legal strategies to provide
cover and protection. White Americans were shocked by the vicious resistance of small pockets of rabid
southern racists to the disciplined non-violent protests of blacks, and public opinion began to move
toward support for racial equality. n63 Key whites in the media, especially television, influenced this shift
in public opinion by portraying black grievances in a sympathetic and appealing light. n64 The movement
culminated in 1960s legislation prohibiting racial segregation and discrimination in public
accommodations, n65 employment, n66 voting rights, n67 and housing. n68 This was the next qualitative
leap forward, and there has been no massive backsliding into the rank forms of segregation and
discrimination that characterized the pre-1960 period.¶ Professor Bell treats the post-1960s claims of
progress as an illusion: discrimination simply became more covert, but equally efficient. n69 The facts,
however, viewed with a holistic perspective, largely refute this claim. n70
Totalizing resistance fails – the only option becomes symbolic action which is no
different from the sqo.
Clark, Catholic University law professor, 1995
[Leroy, 73 Denv. U.L. Rev. 23, “ARTICLE: A Critique of Professor Derrick A. Bell's Thesis of the
Permanence of Racism and His Strategy of Confrontation” Lexis]
Bell's Confrontation Model¶ Broad-based, cooperative activity is, however, the antithesis of the model of
the single heroic individual that Professor Bell admires so much in Confronting Authority. Professor Bell
cannot advance the solo confrontation as a superior strategic approach, so he offers the solace of knowing
that one acted with integrity. That is not enough for most of us, and certainly not enough for blacks as a
people. If a situation is truly unfair, discriminatory, or oppressive, we are obligated to pay careful
attention to the strategy for changing it, or we must accept the fact that our actions are basically futile-however much we seek to congratulate ourselves for our courage. n134¶ Professor Bell cites Paul Robeson
and Martin Luther King, Jr. as exemplars of his model for singular courage. From my perspective, they
functioned in almost diametrically opposite fashions. Paul Robeson fits Professor Bell's model of a man
of courage who took on the white society and the "powers that be" in open confrontation, and in often
highly symbolic action. He all but adopted support of Marxism in a time when anti-communist hysteria
was high, and he sacrificed his profession and career as an artist. One might respect Paul Robeson, but we
must be candid about his strategic failures. He supported a doctrine which failed in the countries he
thought were superior to America, he was not largely embraced by the black community, and he had no
massive impact in terms of changing the institutions that oppressed the black community. n135¶ Martin
Luther King cannot be described in any of those terms. King always worked well within the context of the
black masses and, indeed, drew his strength from their allegiance to him. He worked within a spiritual and
religious context that was familiar to and supported by his followers. King possessed individual courage
n136 and integrity, but he was not a "solo actor." He was counseled, and actually influenced, by members
of his organization and a few whites outside the organization. n137 He also carefully attended to strategy
and the need to bring persons to a level of action and cooperation. Both King and Robeson were
concerned about the excesses of uncontrolled capitalism, but only King had the strategic sense and
capacity to start a "Poor People's Campaign." King was not interested in some defiant gesture of rubbing
the noses of white Americans in their racism. King invited whites to join in a direction that would do as
much for their moral and material welfare as it would for blacks. Because of his perspective, King
developed a viable, active movement involving a broad spectrum of blacks and whites. King, therefore,
unlike Robeson or anyone who would emulate Bell's singular confrontation model, achieved a profound
change in the level of discrimination and oppression experienced by blacks. n138
AT: Progress Impossible – History Disproves
Progress is possible – ending slavery and civil rights prove – the quality of plans are
key which demonstrates the importance of decision-making.
Clark, Catholic University law professor, 1995
[Leroy, 73 Denv. U.L. Rev. 23, “ARTICLE: A Critique of Professor Derrick A. Bell's Thesis of the
Permanence of Racism and His Strategy of Confrontation” Lexis]
The History of Black Progress¶ I must now address the thesis that there has been no evolutionary progress
for blacks in America. Professor Bell concludes that blacks improperly read history if we believe, as
Americans in general believe, that progress--racial, in the case of blacks--is "linear and evolutionary." n49
According to Professor Bell, the "American dogma of automatic progress" has never applied to blacks.
n50 Blacks will never gain full equality, and "even those herculean efforts we hail as successful will
produce no more than temporary 'peaks of progress,' short-lived victories that slide into irrelevance." n51¶
Progress toward reducing racial discrimination and subordination has never been "automatic," if that
refers to some natural and inexorable process without struggle. Nor has progress ever been strictly
"linear" in terms of unvarying year by year improvement, because the combatants on either side of the
equality struggle have varied over time in their energies, resources, capacities, and the quality of their
plans. Moreover, neither side could predict or control all of the variables which accompany progress or
non-progress; some factors, like World War II, occurred in the international arena, and were not
exclusively under American control.¶ With these qualifications, and a long view of history, blacks and
their white allies achieved two profound and qualitatively different leaps forward toward the goal of
equality: the end of slavery, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Moreover, despite open and, lately, covert
resistance, black progress has never been shoved back, in a qualitative sense, to the powerlessness and
abuse of periods preceding these leaps forward. n52¶ The First Qualitative Leap¶ For two-thirds of
American history, African-Americans were, as a matter of law and practice, the property of white slaveholders from birth until death. Professor Bell commented on the ending of this institution: "Two centuries
after the Constitution's adoption, we did live in a far more enlightened world. Slavery was no more." n53¶
That must be the most tepid understatement ever about the ending of the most violent and debasing
condition that blacks ever suffered in this country. Slaves worked six and sometimes seven days a week.
Idle slaves could be flogged, and some were maimed after a failed escape. Families were separated, and
black females were forced into sexual concubinage. Slaves owned nothing, their movement was strictly
circumscribed, and they were kept illiterate as another form of control. n54¶ Ending this degrading
institution was a profound qualitative leap toward freedom, and it was never reversed. White southerners
did regain control of the legislatures, and imposed racial segregation. Racial segregation, however, was a
far cry from the total domination of slavery. Moreover, blacks seized the opportunity to take many steps,
within the confines of segregation, that became the seeds of the next great leap forward into freedom in
the 1950s and 1960s. The newly freed blacks trekked North and West--not an option under slavery--and
there gained critical political leverage. n55 Independent black churches, possible only after the Civil War,
developed a debate between a conservative wing concerned with the hereafter, and a more progressive
wing that sought to use the church as an agency for ameliorating the constrictions in black life. n56 From
the latter, one Martin Luther King sprang forth, galvanizing blacks and the whole nation for the next leap
towards freedom.¶ During Reconstruction, black legislators established a free public school system. Even
though whites imposed segregation on the public schools, they did not abolish them. By 1900, 1.5 million
black children were overcoming the illiteracy imposed on their parents and grandparents in slavery. n57¶
Shortly after the imposition of racial segregation, blacks turned to the United States Supreme Court for
relief from its legal strictures. There were losses at first, the most notable being Plessy v. Ferguson, n58
upholding racial segregation under the "separate but equal" doctrine. As blacks gained more
organizational sophistication, the Court, gradually but progressively, struck down segregation in voting,
n59 in housing, n60 and in graduate schools. n61 The culmination was Brown v. Board of Education, n62
which fully repudiated the Plessy doctrine and held that state sanctioned racial segregation violated the
14th Amendment.¶ Second Qualitative Leap Forward¶ The black-led, and white-supported, civil rights
movement gathered momentum in the late 1950s and early 1960s through marches, "sit-ins"--which
breached racial segregation in public establishments--and the development of legal strategies to provide
cover and protection. White Americans were shocked by the vicious resistance of small pockets of rabid
southern racists to the disciplined non-violent protests of blacks, and public opinion began to move
toward support for racial equality. n63 Key whites in the media, especially television, influenced this shift
in public opinion by portraying black grievances in a sympathetic and appealing light. n64 The movement
culminated in 1960s legislation prohibiting racial segregation and discrimination in public
accommodations, n65 employment, n66 voting rights, n67 and housing. n68 This was the next qualitative
leap forward, and there has been no massive backsliding into the rank forms of segregation and
discrimination that characterized the pre-1960 period.¶ Professor Bell treats the post-1960s claims of
progress as an illusion: discrimination simply became more covert, but equally efficient. n69 The facts,
however, viewed with a holistic perspective, largely refute this claim. n70
AT: Progress Impossible – Right Cooptation Turn
Access args get coopted by the right to fortify exclusion.
Patterson, Harvard University sociology professor, 1998
[Orlando, “The Ordeal Of Integration: Progress And Resentment In America's "Racial" Crisis”
http://books.google.com/books?id=W4d8ghK2H8C&q=In+the+attempt+to+understand+and+come+to+terms+with+#v=snippet&q=In%20the
%20attempt%20to%20understand%20and%20come%20to%20terms%20with&f=false, p.ix-x]
In the attempt to understand and come to terms with the problems of Afro-Americans and of their
interethnic relations, the country has been ill served by its intellectuals, policy advocates, and leaders in
recent years. At present, dogmatic ethnic advocates and extremists appear to dominate discourse on the
subject, drowning out both moderate and other dissenting voices.¶ A strange convergence has emerged
between these extremists. On the left, the nation is misled by an endless stream of tracts and studies that
deny any meaningful change in America's "Two Nations," decry "The Myth of Black Progress," mourn
"The Dream Deferred," dismiss AfroAmerican middle-class status as "Volunteer Slavery," pronounce
AfroAmerican men an "Endangered Species," and apocalyptically announce "The Coming Race War."
On the right is complete agreement with this dismal portrait in which we are fast "Losing Ground,"
except that the road to "racial" hell, according to conservatives, has been paved by the very policies
intended to help solve the problem, abetted by "The Dream and the Nightmare" of cultural changes in the
sixties and by the overbreeding and educational integration of inferior Afro-Americans and very policies
intended to help solve the problem, abetted by "The Dream and the Nightmare" of cultural changes in the
sixties and by the overbreeding and educational integration of inferior Afro-Americans and lower-class
Euro-Americans genetically situated on the wrong tail of the IQ "Bell Curve." ¶ If it is true that a "racial
crisis" persists in America, this crisis is as much one of perception and interpretation as of actual
socioeconomic and interethnic realities. By any measure, the record of the past half century has been
one of great achievement, thanks in good part to the suecess of the government policies now being
maligned by the left for not having gone far enough and by the right for having both failed and gone
too far. At the same time, there is still no room for complacency: because our starting point half a century
ago was so deplorably backward, we still have some way to go before approaching anything like a
resolution.
AT: Civil Rights Act Bad
Even if the Civil Rights Act wasn’t perfect, it is disingenuous to say it was worthless
– it required massive effort and did produce some value.
Roithmayr, University of Illinois College of law assistant law professor, 2001
[Daria, 22 Cardozo Law Review 1113, “CRITICAL LEGAL POLITICS: LEFT VS. MPM: LEFT OVER
RIGHTS” Lexis]
In contrast to the earlier cls position, Critique puts forward a "minimalist" indeterminacy critique that
is much less corrosive. n34 It is not that rights discourse is always indeterminate and can never
produce closure. Although rights discourse does frequently fail to reach closure, at other times and in
other (rare) circumstances, rights actually have appeared to produce some sort of useful result or
determinate outcome. n35 But in neither case has the discourse succeeded or failed because rights
categorically trump other competing claims. Rather, Kennedy argues that the success or failure of a
rights claim depends on a range of political forces that cannot be predicted in advance. That is, a
successful rights argument depends not on the "scope" of the right or its application to a set of facts,
but on a less-than-formulaic interpretive relationship between the rights claim, the identity and
diligence of the rights claimer, the political viability of supporting arguments, timing, and luck, among
other factors. n36 Kennedy agrees with CRT argument that rights has produced value in the context
of the civil rights movement, and is quick to note that his newly minimalist rights critique did not
constitute an indictment of the civil rights era. n37 He does not intend to suggest that communities of
color had been wrong or misguided to use rights as part of a demand for inclusion. n38 Rather, he
seeks to remind them that their success has been a matter of hard work, chance, and historical
circumstance - they have succeeded not because rights are somehow categorically distinct from
nonrights political interests, but because their timing during the civil rights era had been great,
rights discourse had taken on a particularly [*1119] liberatory meaning at a particular time, and
they had worked extraordinarily hard to organize politically. n39
2nr – EXTN – Uniqueness/Feldscher
World is getting better for black people – over the last 50 years there have been
material changes that have been good for people of color, there are targeted reforms
that are possible, that’s Feldscher.
2nr – EXTN – State Solves/Smith
No reason you should defer on reforms for the rev, that’s Smith.
1. Endorsing particular actions doesn’t mean you endorse all of the state’s
history. Endorsing state action can be STRATEGIC, not WHOLESALE.
2. No tradeoff – can endorse changes to the state as well as build an alternative
structure - proves no ethics impacts.
If AFF:
3. This also means there is no ethics DA to the perm – a state link is
INSUFFICIENT to vote neg.
***Anti-Blackness***
Frontline – Anti-Blackness
Trends point toward greater equality – progress is slow and steady.
Beauchamp, Think Progress, 12-11-13
[Zack, “5 Reasons Why 2013 Was The Best Year In Human”
http://thinkprogress.org/security/2013/12/11/3036671/2013-certainly-year-human-history/]
Between the brutal civil war in Syria, the government shutdown and all of the deadly dysfunction it represents, the NSA spying revelations, and
massive inequality, it’d be easy to for you to enter 2014 thinking the last year has been an awful one.¶ But you’d be wrong. We have every
reason to believe that 2013
was, in fact, the best year on the planet for humankind.¶ Contrary to what you might have
heard, virtually all of the most important forces that determine what make people’s lives good — the things
that determine how long they live, and whether they live happily and freely — are trending in an extremely happy direction.
While it’s possible that this progress could be reversed by something like runaway climate change, the effects will
have to be dramatic to overcome the extraordinary and growing progress we’ve made in making the
world a better place.¶ Here’s the five big reasons why.¶ 1. Fewer people are dying young, and more are living
longer.¶ India Polio¶ CREDIT: AP PHOTO/MAHESH KUMAR¶ The greatest story in recent human history is the simplest:
we’re winning the fight against death. “There is not a single country in the world where infant or child
mortality today is not lower than it was in 1950,” writes Angus Deaton, a Princeton economist who
works on global health issues.¶ The most up-to-date numbers on global health, the 2013 World Health Organization (WHO)
statistical compendium, confirm Deaton’s estimation. Between 1990 and 2010, the percentage of children who died before their fifth
birthday dropped by almost half. Measles deaths declined by 71 percent, and both tuberculosis and maternal deaths by half again. HIV, that
modern plague, is also being held back, with deaths from AIDS-related illnesses down by 24 percent since 2005.¶ In short, fewer people are
dying untimely deaths. And that’s
not only true in rich countries: life expectancy has gone up between 1990 and
2011 in every WHO income bracket. The gains are even more dramatic if you take the long view: global life expectancy was 47 in
the early 1950s, but had risen to 70 — a 50 percent jump — by 2011. For even more perspective, the average Briton in 1850 — when the British
Empire had reached its apex — was 40. The average person today should expect to live almost twice as long as the average citizen of the
world’s wealthiest and most powerful country in 1850.¶ In real terms, this means millions of fewer dead adults and children a year, millions
fewer people who spend their lives suffering the pains and unfreedoms imposed by illness, and millions more people spending their twilight
years with loved ones. And the trends are all positive — “progress has accelerated in recent years in many countries with the highest rates of
mortality,” as the WHO rather bloodlessly put it.¶ What’s going on? Obviously, it’s fairly complicated, but the
most important drivers
have been technological and political innovation. The Enlightenment-era advances in the scientific
method got people doing high-quality research, which brought us modern medicine and the information
technologies that allow us to spread medical breakthroughs around the world at increasingly faster
rates. Scientific discoveries also fueled the Industrial Revolution and the birth of modern capitalism,
giving us more resources to devote to large-scale application of live-saving technologies. And the global
spread of liberal democracy made governments accountable to citizens, forcing them to attend to their
health needs or pay the electoral price.¶ We’ll see the enormously beneficial impact of these two forces, technology and
democracy, repeatedly throughout this list, which should tell you something about the foundations of human progress. But when talking about
improvements in health, we shouldn’t neglect foreign aid. Nations donating huge amounts of money out of an altruistic interest in the welfare
of foreigners is historically unprecedented, and while not all aid has been helpful, health aid has been a huge boon.¶ Even Deaton, who wrote
one of 2013′s harshest assessments of foreign aid, believes “the case for assistance to fight disease such as HIV/AIDS or smallpox is strong.”
That’s because these programs have demonstrably saved lives — the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), a 2003 program
pushed by President Bush, paid for anti-retroviral treatment for over 5.1 million people in the poor countries hardest-hit by the AIDS epidemic.¶
So we’re
outracing the Four Horseman, extending our lives faster than pestilence, war, famine, and death can take them. That
alone should be enough to say the world is getting better.¶ 2. Fewer people suffer from extreme
poverty, and the world is getting happier.¶ APTOPIX India Maha Kumbh¶ CREDIT: SAURABH DAS/AP PHOTO¶ There are
fewer people in abject penury than at any other point in human history, and middle class people enjoy
their highest standard of living ever. We haven’t come close to solving poverty: a number of African countries in
particular have chronic problems generating growth, a nut foreign aid hasn’t yet cracked. So this
isn’t a call for complacency about
poverty any more than acknowledging victories over disease is an argument against tackling malaria. But make no mistake: as a
whole, the world is much richer in 2013 than it was before.¶ 721 million fewer people lived in extreme
poverty ($1.25 a day) in 2010 than in 1981, according to a new World Bank study from October. That’s
astounding — a decline from 40 to about 14 percent of the world’s population suffering from abject
want. And poverty rates are declining in every national income bracket: even in low income countries, the
percentage of people living in extreme poverty ($1.25 a day in 2005 dollars) a day gone down from 63 in 1981 to 44 in 2010.¶ We can be fairly
confident that these trends are continuing. For one thing, they survived the Great Recession in 2008. For another, the decline in poverty has
been fueled by global economic growth, which looks to be continuing: global GDP grew by 2.3 percent in 2012, a number that’ll rise to 2.9
percent in 2013 according to IMF projections.¶ The bulk of the recent decline in poverty comes form India and China — about 80 percent from
China *alone*. Chinese economic and social reform, a delayed reaction to the mass slaughter and starvation of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, has
been the engine of poverty’s global decline. If you subtract China, there are actually more poor people today than there were in 1981
(population growth trumping the percentage declines in poverty).¶ But we shouldn’t discount China. If what we care about is fewer people
suffering the misery of poverty, then it shouldn’t matter what nation the less-poor people call home. Chinese growth should be celebrated, not
shunted aside.¶ The
poor haven’t been the only people benefitting from global growth. Middle class people
have access to an ever-greater stock of life-improving goods. Televisions and refrigerators, once luxury goods, are now
comparatively cheap and commonplace. That’s why large-percentage improvements in a nation’s GDP appear to correlate strongly with higher
levels of happiness among the nation’s citizens; people like having things that make their lives easier and more worry-free.¶ Global economic
growth in the past five decades has dramatically reduced poverty and made people around the world happier. Once again, we’re better off.¶
3. War is becoming rarer and less deadly.¶ APTOPIX Mideast Libya¶ CREDIT: AP PHOTO/ MANU BRABO¶ Another massive
conflict could overturn the global progress against disease and poverty. But it appears war, too, may be losing its fangs.¶ Steven Pinker’s
2011 book The Better Angels Of Our Nature is the gold standard in this debate. Pinker brought a treasure trove of
data to bear on the question of whether the world has gotten more peaceful, and found that, in the long arc of
human history, both war and other forms of violence (the death penalty, for instance) are on a
centuries-long downward slope.¶ Pinker summarizes his argument here if you don’t own the book. Most eye-popping are
the numbers for the past 50 years; Pinker finds that “the worldwide rate of death from interstate and
civil war combined has juddered downward…from almost 300 per 100,000 world population during
World War II, to almost 30 during the Korean War, to the low teens during the era of the Vietnam War,
to single digits in the 1970s and 1980s, to less than 1 in the twenty-first century.” Here’s what that looks like
graphed:¶ Pinker¶ CREDIT: STEVEN PINKER/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL¶ So it looks like the smallest percentage of humans alive
since World War II, and in all likelihood in human history, are living through the horrors of war. Did 2013 give us any reason
to believe that Pinker and the other scholars who agree with him have been proven wrong?¶ Probably not. The academic debate over the
decline of war really exploded in 2013, but the “declinist” thesis has fared pretty well. Challenges
to Pinker’s conclusion that battle
deaths have gone down over time have not withstood scrutiny. The most compelling critique, a new paper by Bear F. Braumoeller,
argues that if you control for the larger number of countries in the last 50 years, war happens at roughly the same rates as it has historically.¶
There are lots of things you might say about Braumoeller’s argument, and I’ve asked Pinker for his two cents (update: Pinker’s response here).
But most importantly, if battle deaths per 100,000 people really has declined, then his argument doesn’t mean very much. If
(percentagewise) fewer people are dying from war, then what we call “war” now is a lot less deadly than “war” used
to be. Braumoeller suggests population growth and improvements in battle medicine explain the decline, but that’s not convincing: tell me
with a straight face that the only differences in deadliness between World War II, Vietnam, and the wars you see today is that there are more
people and better doctors.¶ There’s a more rigorous way of putting that: today,
we see many more civil wars than we do
wars between nations. The former tend to be less deadly than the latter. That’s why the other major challenge to Pinker’s
thesis in 2013, the deepening of the Syrian civil war, isn’t likely to upset the overall trend. Syria’s war is an unimaginable
tragedy, one responsible for the rare, depressing increase in battle deaths from 2011 to 2012. However, the overall 2011-2012 trend
“fits well with the observed long-term decline in battle deaths,” according to researchers at the
authoritative Uppsala Conflict Data Program, because the uptick is not enough to suggest an overall
change in trend. We should expect something similar when the 2013 numbers are published.¶ Why are smaller and smaller percentages
of people being exposed to the horrors of war? There are lots of reasons one could point to, but two of the biggest ones are the spread of
democracy and humans getting, for lack of a better word, better.¶ That democracies never, or almost never, go to war with each other is not
seriously in dispute: the statistical evidence is ridiculously strong. While some argue that the “democratic peace,” as it’s called, is caused by
things other than democracy itself, there’s
good experimental evidence that democratic leaders and citizens just
don’t want to fight each other.¶ Since 1950, democracy has spread around the world like wildfire. There
were only a handful of democracies after World War II, but that grew to roughly 40 percent of all by the end of the Cold War. Today, a
comfortable majority — about 60 percent — of all states are democracies. This freer world is also a safer one.¶ Second — and this is Pinker’s
preferred explanation — people have developed strategies for dealing with war’s causes and consequences. “Human ingenuity and experience
have gradually been brought to bear,” Pinker writes, “just as they have chipped away at hunger and disease.” A series of human inventions,
things like U.N. peacekeeping operations, which nowadays are very successful at reducing violence, have given us a set of social tools
increasingly well suited to reducing the harm caused by armed conflict.¶ War’s decline isn’t accidental, in other words. It’s by design.¶
4.
Rates of murder and other violent crimes are in free-fall.¶ Britain Unrest¶ CREDIT: AKIRA SUEMORI/AP PHOTOS¶
Pinker’s trend against violence isn’t limited just to war. It seems likes crimes, both of the sort states
commit against their citizens and citizens commit against each other, are also on the decline.¶ Take a few
examples. Slavery, once commonly sanctioned by governments, is illegal everywhere on earth. The use of torture as legal
punishment has gone down dramatically. The European murder rate fell 35-fold from the Middle Ages to
the beginning of the 20th century (check out this amazing 2003 paper from Michael Eisner, who dredged up medieval records to
estimate European homicide rates in the swords-and-chivalry era, if you don’t believe me).¶ The decline has been especially marked in recent
years. Though homicide crime rates climbed back up from their historic lows between the 1970s and 1990s, reversing progress made since the
late 19th century, they have collapsed worldwide in the 21st century. 557,000
people were murdered in 2001 — almost
three times as many as were killed in war that year. In 2008, that number was 289,000, and the
homicide rate has been declining in 75 percent of nations since then.¶ Statistics from around the developed world,
where numbers are particularly reliable, show that it’s not just homicide that’s on the wane: it’s almost all violent
crime. US government numbers show that violent crime in the United States declined from a peak of about 750 crimes per 100,000
Americans to under 450 by 2009. G7 as a whole countries show huge declines in homicide, robbery, and vehicle theft.¶ So even in countries
that aren’t at poor or at war, most people’s lives are getting safer and more secure. Why?¶ We know it’s not incarceration. While the United
States and Britain have dramatically increased their prison populations, others, like Canada, the Netherlands, and Estonia, reduced their
incarceration rates and saw similar declines in violent crime. Same thing state-to-state in the United States; New York imprisoned fewer people
and saw the fastest crime decline in the country.¶ The Economist’s deep dive into the explanations for crime’s collapse provides a few answers.
Globally, police have gotten better at working with communities and targeting areas with the most crime. They’ve also gotten new toys, like
DNA testing, that make it easier to catch criminals.¶ The crack epidemic in the United States and its heroin twin in Europe have both slowed
down dramatically. Rapid gentrification has made inner-city crime harder. And the increasing cheapness of “luxury” goods like iPods and DVD
players has reduced incentives for crime on both the supply and demand sides: stealing a DVD player isn’t as profitable, and it’s easier for a
would-be thief to buy one in the first place.¶ But there’s one explanation The Economist dismissed that strikes me as hugely important: the
abolition of lead gasoline. Kevin
Drum at Mother Jones wrote what’s universally acknowledged to be the
definitive argument for the lead/crime link, and it’s incredibly compelling. We know for a fact that lead
exposure damages people’s brains and can potentially be fatal; that’s why an international campaign to
ban leaded gasoline started around 1970. Today, leaded gasoline is almost unheard of — it’s banned in 175
countries, and there’s been a decline in lead blood levels by about 90 percent.¶ Drum marshals a wealth of evidence that the
parts of the brain damaged by lead are the same ones that check people’s aggressive impulses. Moreover,
the timing matches up: crime shot up in the mid-to-late-20th century as cars spread around the world, and started to decline in the 70s as the
anti-lead campaign was succeeding. Here’s close the relationship is, using data from the United States:¶ Lead_Crime_325¶ Now, non-homicide
violent crime appears to have ticked up in 2012, based on U.S. government surveys of victims of crime, but it’s
very possible that’s
just a blip: the official Department of Justice report says up-front that “the apparent increase in the rate of violent crimes reported to police
from 2011 to 2012 was not statistically significant.Ӧ So we have no reason to believe crime is making a come back, and every reason to believe
the historical decline in criminal violence is here to stay.¶
5. There’s less racism, sexism, and other forms of
discrimination in the world.¶ Nelson Mandela¶ CREDIT: THEANA CALITZ/AP IMAGES¶ Racism, sexism, anti-Semitism,
homophobia, and other forms of discrimination remain, without a doubt, extraordinarily powerful
forces. The statistical and experimental evidence is overwhelming — this irrefutable proof of widespread discrimination against AfricanAmericans, for instance, should put the “racism is dead” fantasy to bed.¶ Yet the need to combat discrimination denial shouldn’t blind us to
the good news. Over the centuries, humanity has made extraordinary progress in taming its hate for and ill-
treatment of other humans on the basis of difference alone. Indeed, it is very likely that we live in the
least discriminatory era in the history of modern civilization. It’s not a huge prize given how bad the past
had been, but there are still gains worth celebrating.¶ Go back 150 years in time and the point should be
obvious. Take four prominent groups in 1860: African-Americans were in chains, European Jews were routinely
massacred in the ghettos and shtetls they were confined to, women around the world were denied the opportunity to work outside the home
and made almost entirely subordinate to their husbands, and LGBT people were invisible. The improvements in each of these group’s statuses
today, both in the United States and internationally, are incontestable. ¶ On closer look, we
have reason to believe the happy
trends are likely to continue. Take racial discrimination. In 2000, Harvard sociologist Lawrence Bobo
penned a comprehensive assessment of the data on racial attitudes in the United States. He found a
“national consensus” on the ideals of racial equality and integration. “A nation once comfortable as a
deliberately segregationist and racially discriminatory society has not only abandoned that view,” Bobo
writes, “but now overtly positively endorses the goals of racial integration and equal treatment. There is
no sign whatsoever of retreat from this ideal, despite events that many thought would call it into
question. The magnitude, steadiness, and breadth of this change should be lost on no one.Ӧ The norm
against overt racism has gone global. In her book on the international anti-apartheid movement in the 1980s, Syracuse’s Audie
Klotz says flatly that “the illegitimacy of white minority rule led to South Africa’s persistent diplomatic, cultural, and economic isolation.” The
belief that racial discrimination could not be tolerated had become so widespread, Klotz argues, that it united the globe — including
governments that had strategic interests in supporting South Africa’s whites — in opposition to apartheid. In 2011, 91 percent of respondents
in a sample of 21 diverse countries said that equal treatment of people of different races or ethnicities was important to them.¶ Racism
obviously survived both American and South African apartheid, albeit in more subtle, insidious forms.
“The death of Jim Crow racism has left us in an uncomfortable place,” Bobo writes, “a state of laissez-faire racism” where racial discrimination
and disparities still exist, but support for the kind of aggressive government policies needed to address them is racially polarized. But
there’s reason to hope that’ll change as well: two massive studies of the political views of younger
Americans by my TP Ideas colleagues, John Halpin and Ruy Teixeira, found that millenials were
significantly more racially tolerant and supportive of government action to address racial disparities
than the generations that preceded them. Though I’m not aware of any similar research of on a global scale, it’s hard not to
imagine they’d find similar results, suggesting that we should have hope that the power of racial prejudice may be waning.¶ The story
about gender discrimination is very similar: after the feminist movement’s enormous victories in the
20th century, structural sexism still shapes the world in profound ways, but the cause of gender equality
is making progress. In 2011, 86 percent of people in a diverse 21 country sample said that equal
treatment on the basis of gender was an important value. The U.N.’s Human Development Report’s
Gender Inequality Index — a comprehensive study of reproductive health, social empowerment, and
labor market equity — saw a 20 percent decline in observable gender inequalities from 1995 to 2011.
IMF data show consistent global declines in wage disparities between genders, labor force participation, and
educational attainment around the world. While enormous inequality remains, 2013 is looking to be the worst year for sexism in history.¶
Finally, we’ve made astonishing progress on sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination —
largely in the past 15 years. At the beginning of 2003, zero Americans lived in marriage equality states;
by the end of 2013, 38 percent of Americans will. Article 13 of the European Community Treaty bans discrimination on the
grounds of sexual orientation, and, in 2011, the UN Human Rights Council passed a resolution committing the council to documenting and
exposing discrimination on orientation or identity grounds around the world. The public
opinion trends are positive
worldwide: all of the major shifts from 2007 to 2013 in Pew’s “acceptance of homosexuality” poll were
towards greater tolerance, and young people everywhere are more open to equality for LGBT individuals than their older peers.¶
best_year_graphics-04¶ Once again, these victories are partial and by no means inevitable. Racism, sexism,
homophobia, and other forms of discrimination aren’t just “going away” on their own. They’re losing
their hold on us because people are working to change other people’s minds and because governments
are passing laws aimed at promoting equality. Positive trends don’t mean the problems are close to
solved, and certainly aren’t excuses for sitting on our hands.¶ That’s true of everything on this list. The fact that fewer people are dying from
war and disease doesn’t lessen the moral imperative to do something about those that are; the fact that people are getting richer and safer in
their homes isn’t an excuse for doing more to address poverty and crime.¶ But too often, the worst parts about the world are treated as
inevitable, the prospect of radical victory over pain and suffering dismissed as utopian fantasy. The overwhelming force of the evidence shows
that to be false. As best we can tell, the reason humanity is getting better is because humans have decided to make the world a better place.
We consciously chose to develop lifesaving medicine and build freer political systems; we’ve passed laws against workplace discrimination and
poisoning children’s minds with lead.¶ So far, these choices have more than paid off. It’s up to us to make sure they continue to.
Using the state strategically is critical to fighting racism and solves the link to their
ethics impact.
Smith, Associate Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at UC Riverside, 12
(Andrea, “The Moral Limits of the Law: Settler Colonialism and the Anti-Violence Movement,” settler
colonial studies 2, 2 (2012) Special Issue: Karangatia: Calling Out Gender and Sexuality in Settler
Societies, http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/2201473X.2012.10648842)
Given the logics of settler colonialism, it may seem to be a hopeless contradiction to work within the
US legal system at all. In fact, many social justice advocates eschew engaging in legal reform for this
reason. Consequently, we are often presented with two dichotomous choices: short-term legal reform
that addresses immediate needs but further invests us in the current colonial system or long-term
anti-colonial organising that attempts to avoid the political contradictions of short-term strategies
but does not necessarily focus on immediate needs. This essay will explore possibilities for rethinking
this dichotomous approach by rethinking the role of legal reform in general. The essay foregrounds
alternative approaches using a Native feminist analytic towards engaging legal reform that may
have a greater potential to undo the logics of settler colonialism from within. As I have argued
elsewhere, Native feminism as well as Native studies is not limited in its object of analysis.5 Rather, in its
interest in addressing the intersecting logics of heteropatriarchy and settler colonialism, it is free to
engage with diverse materials. In looking then towards alternative strategies for undoing settler
colonialism through the law, I contend that it is important to engage important work that might not seem
to be directly about Native peoples or settler colonialism if this work helps provide new resources for how
we could strategically engage the law. Consequently, I engage the work of legal scholars and activists that
address very different areas of law as a means to challenge some of the current assumptions that
undergird both reformist and revolutionary approaches to the law. DECOLONIAL REALISM Critical
race theorist Derrick Bell challenged the presupposition of much racial justice legal reform
strategies when he argued that racism is a permanent feature of society. While his work is generally
cited as a critical race theoretical approach, I would contend that his work implicitly suggests a settler
colonial framework for understanding legal reform. That is, many of the heirs of Derrick Bell do not
follow the logical consequences of his work and argue for an approach to race and the law that
seeks racial representation in the law.6 However, Bell’s analysis points to the inherent
contradictions to such an approach. Rather than seeking representation, Bell calls on Black peoples
to ‘acknowledge the permanence of our subordinate status’.7 Espousing the framework of ‘racial
realism’, Bell disavows any possibility of ‘transcendent change’.8 To the contrary, he argues that ‘[i]t
is time we concede that a commitment to racial equality merely perpetuates our disempowerment’.9
The alternative he advocates is resistance for its own sake – living ‘to harass white folks’ – or shortterm pragmatic strategies that focus less on eliminating racism and more on simply ensuring that
we do not ‘worsen conditions for those we are trying to help’.10 While Bell does not elaborate on
what those strategies may be, he points to a different kind of reasoning that could be utilised for legal
reform. In his famous story, ‘Space Traders’, aliens come to planet Earth promising to solve the
world’s problems if world leaders will simply give up Black people to the aliens. This story
narratively illustrates how thin white liberal commitments to social justice are. First, the white people of
course do give up Black people to the aliens without much thought. But what more dramatically
illustrates this point is that the reader knows that, almost without a doubt, if this were to happen in real
life, of course Black people would be given up. Within this story, however, is a little-commented scene
that speaks to perhaps a different way to approach legal reform within the context of white
supremacy. Gleason Golightly, a conservative black economics professor who serves as an informal
cabinet member for the President, becomes embroiled in a fight with the civil rights legal
establishment about the best means to oppose the proposed trade. Golightly had previously pleaded
with the President and his cabinet to reject it. When his pleas are not heard, he begins to reflect on
how his support for conservative racial policies in the interests of attaining greater political power
had been to no avail. He realises the strategy behind his appeal to the President was doomed to fail. In
retrospect, though [his] arguments were based on morality […] [i]nstead of outsmarting them,
Golightly had done what he so frequently criticised civil rights spokespersons for doing: he had
tried to get whites to do right by black people because it was right that they do so. ‘Crazy!’ he
commented when civil rights people did it. ‘Crazy!’ he mumbled to himself, at himself.11 Realising the
error of his ways, Golightly interrupts this civil rights meeting in which activists plan to organise a
moral crusade to convince white Americans to reject the space traders proposal. Instead, he
suggests that they should tell white people that they cannot wait to go on the ship because they have
learned they are being transported to a land of milk and honey. White people, argues Golightly, so
oppose policies that benefit Black people, even if they benefit white people, that they will start
litigating to stop the space traders’ proposed plan.12 The civil rights establishment rejects this
strategy as a moral outrage and begins a racial justice campaign, ultimately to no avail. What this
story troubles is social justice movements’ investment in the morality of the law. Despite the US
legal system’s complicity in settler colonialism, patriarchy, capitalism and white supremacy since
its inception, they advocate strategies for change that rest on the presupposition that the law can
somehow be made to support the end of sexism, racism and classism. Historically, as more radical
racial and social justice organisations were either crushed or co-opted by the US governments
during the 1970s, these movements shifted from a focus on a radical restructuring of the political
and economic system to a focus on articulating identity based claims that did not necessarily
challenge the prevailing power structure.13 If groups were not going to directly challenge the state,
they could then call on the state to recognise their claims to equality and redress from harms
perpetrated by other social actors. Ironically, then, the same US government that codified slavery,
segregation, anti-immigrant racism, and the genocide of indigenous peoples, now becomes the body
that will protect people of colour from racism. The fact that the US itself could not exist without the
past and continuing genocide of indigenous peoples in particular does not strike liberal legal reformists as
a contradiction. Bell suggests that it may be possible to engage in legal reform in the midst of these
contradictions if one foregoes the fantasy that the law is morally benevolent or even neutral. In
doing so, more possibilities for strategic engagement emerge. For instance, in the ‘Racial Preference
Licensing Act’, Bell suggests that rather than criminalise racial discrimination, the government
should allow discrimination, but tax it. Taxes accrued from this discrimination would then go into
an ‘equality’ fund that would support the educational and economic interests of AfricanAmericans.14 As I have argued elsewhere, the law enforcement approach has been similarly limited in
addressing the issues of gender violence when the majority of men do, or express willingness to engage
in, it.15 As a result, criminalisation has not actually led to a decrease in violence against women.16 Anti-
violence activists and scholars have widely critiqued the supposed efficacy of criminalisation.17 As I will
discuss later in this essay, Native women in particular have struggled with the contradictions of engaging
the legal system to address the legacies of colonial gender violence. While there is growing critique
around criminalisation as the primary strategy for addressing gender violence, there has not been
attention to what other frameworks could be utilised for addressing gender violence. In particular, what
would happen if we pursued legal strategies based on their strategic effects rather than based on
the moral statements they propose to make?
EXTN – Uniqueness – Anti-Blackness
World is getting better – 2013 was the best year on the planet – every metric goes
[insert side], people are living longer, less people are experiencing war, the world is
richer, and discrimination on the basis of race is decreasing – studies demonstrate
attitudes are changing – that’s Beauchamp. Prefer it – our ev takes into account
their args – their ev cites snapshots, our cites trends and has recency.
Trends all point toward equality – racist mindsets are shifting and conditions for
blacks is improving – proves progress is possible.
Currie, American Enterprise Institute The American Magazine managing editor,
2008
[Duncan, “The Long March of Racial Progress” http://www.american.com/archive/2008/november-1108/the-long-march-of-racial-progress/]
The story of race relations in America is one of extraordinary change and transformation.¶ There will be
plenty of time to parse the exit polls, review the campaign, and predict how Barack Obama will govern as
America’s 44th chief executive. But for now, we should pause to reflect on the long march of racial
progress that made it possible for a black man to become president of a country that fewer than 50 years
ago still tolerated discriminatory Jim Crow laws.¶ Measuring racial progress is all about perspective. Since
Appomattox, the struggle for racial equality has seen triumphs and setbacks alike. On balance, however,
the story of race relations in America is one of extraordinary change and transformation.¶ According to
Princeton historian James McPherson, the rate of black illiteracy dropped from roughly 90 percent in
1865 to 70 percent in 1880 and to under 50 percent in 1900. “From the perspective of today, this may
seem like minimal progress,” McPherson wrote in his 1991 book, Abraham Lincoln and the Second
American Revolution (a collection of essays). “But viewed from the standpoint of 1865 the rate of
literacy for blacks increased by 200 percent in fifteen years and by 400 percent in thirty-five years.Ӧ
McPherson also noted that the share of school-age black children attending school jumped from 2 percent
in 1860 to 34 percent in 1880. “During the same period,” he said, “the proportion of white children of
school age attending school had grown only from 60 to 62 percent.” ¶ In 1908, 100 years before the
election of America’s first black president, there was a bloody race riot in Springfield, Illinois, which
began when an angry mob surrounded a prison where a black man falsely accused of rape was being held.
As columnist George Will has observed, “The siege of the jail, the rioting, the lynching, and mutilating all
occurred within walking distance of where, in 2007, Barack Obama announced his presidential
candidacy.Ӧ Over the past century, the racial attitudes of white Americans have undergone a sea
change. The shift toward greater racial tolerance was driven by many factors, including blacks’
participation in World War II, the integration of professional sports and the military, and the civil rights
movement.¶ “Even as Americans were voting more conservatively in the 1980s, their views on race were
becoming more liberal,” Wall Street Journal senior editor Jonathan Kaufman wrote recently. “More than
three quarters of whites in 1972 told pollsters that ‘blacks should not push themselves where they are not
wanted.’ Two-thirds of whites that same year said they opposed laws prohibiting racial discrimination in
the sale of homes. Forty percent said whites had the right to live in segregated neighborhoods.” However,
“By the end of 1980s, all those numbers had fallen markedly and [they] continued to fall through the
following decades.Ӧ As University of Michigan sociologist Reynolds Farley points out in a new paper,
there are now 41 African Americans serving in the House of Representatives, compared to only six when
the Kerner Commission issued its famous report on race and poverty in 1968. During the years following
the Kerner Report, “The slowly rising incomes of black men and the more rapidly rising incomes of black
women produced an important economic change for African Americans,” Farley writes. “In 1996, for the
first time, the majority of blacks were in the economic middle class or above, if that means living in a
household with an income at least twice the poverty line.”¶ According to Farley, “Only three percent of
African Americans could be described as economically comfortable in 1968. That has increased to 17
percent at present. This is an unambiguous sign of racial progress: one black household in six could be
labeled financially comfortable.” He notes that the black-white poverty gap “is much smaller now” than it
was in the late 1960s.¶ Residential and marriage trends are also encouraging. “The trend toward less
residential segregation that emerged in the 1980s and accelerated in the 1990s continues in this century,”
says Farley. Meanwhile, interracial marriage rates have increased dramatically. “At the time of the Kerner
Report, about one black husband in 100 was enumerated with a white spouse. By 2006, about 14 percent
of young black husbands were married to white women.”
There is progress in alleviating racial inequality – pragmatic and targeted reforms
are able to be materially beneficial.
Feldscher, Harvard School of Public Health, 9-19-13
[Karen, “Progress, but challenges in reducing racial disparities,”
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/features/progress-but-challenges-in-reducing-racial-disparities/]
Disparities between blacks and whites in the U.S. remain pronounced—and health is no exception. A panel of
experts at Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) discussed these disparities—what they are, why they persist,
and what to do about them—at a September 12, 2013 event titled “Dialogue on Race, Justice, and Public Health.”¶ The event was held in Kresge
G-1 and featured panelists Lisa Coleman, Harvard University’s chief diversity officer; David Williams, Florence Sprague Norman and Laura
Smart Norman Professor of Public Health in the HSPH Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences; Chandra Jackson, Yerby Postdoctoral
Research Fellow in the HSPH Department of Nutrition; and Zinzi Bailey, a fifth-year doctoral student in the HSPH Department of Social and
Behavioral Sciences. Robert Blendon, Richard L. Menschel Professor of Public Health and Professor of Health Policy and Political Analysis at
HSPH, moderated the discussion.¶ Gains, but pains¶ Health care disparities are troubling, Coleman said. One study found that doctors
recommended coronary revascularization—bypass surgery that replaces blocked blood vessels with new ones—among white patients with heart
disease 50% of the time, but just 23% of the time for blacks. Black women are less likely to be given a bone marrow density test than white
women, even when it’s known they’ve had prior fractures. And the black infant mortality rate is 2.3 times higher than that of non-Hispanic
whites.¶ Each
speaker acknowledged that racial minorities have made significant gains over the past halfcentury, but said there is much more work still to do. They cited statistics providing stark evidence of
continuing disparities in health, wealth, education, income, arrest and incarceration rates, foreclosure
rates, and poverty. Coleman called the data “disconcerting; in some cases, alarming.”¶ Schools are desegregated, she said, but not
integrated; median income is $50,000 per year for whites but $31,000 a year for blacks and $37,000 a year for Hispanics; since the 1960s, the
unemployment rate among blacks has been two to two-and-a-half times higher than for whites; and one in three black men can expect to spend
time in prison during their lifetimes.¶ Blendon shared results from surveys that accentuate sharp differences of opinion about how well blacks are
faring in the U.S. For instance, in a survey that asked participants if they thought that the lives of black Americans had changed dramatically over
the past 50 years, 54% of whites said yes but only 29% of blacks did. Another survey asked whether or not people approved of the verdict in the
George Zimmerman trial; 51% of whites approved but only 9% of blacks did. ¶ Reducing disparities through research, education¶ Jackson talked
about growing up in a segregated neighborhood in Atlanta and attending a school with 99% black students and inadequate resources. She became
the first in her family to attend college. Now, through her research, she hopes to expose and reduce racial health disparities. In a recent study in
the American Journal of Epidemiology, Jackson and colleagues reported that blacks—particularly black professionals—get less sleep than whites,
which can have potentially negative impacts on health.¶ Bailey
discussed what’s known as the “school-to-prison
pipeline”—a trajectory in which black teens do poorly in school, get held back a grade, drop out, commit a crime, then end up in jail. On the
flip side, she said, there are “diversity pipelines” to recruit minority students into higher education. “Often these programs target
students who have already avoided the school-to-prison pipeline,” Bailey said, noting that she would like to see higher education institutions
connect with black students at earlier ages to steer them toward positive choices. ¶ Williams
said continuing disparities between
whites and minorities are by-products of lingering racial prejudice that is deeply embedded in American
society. He cited a study of popular U.S. television shows that found many black actors on the shows—something to celebrate—but also much
more negative nonverbal behavior directed toward black actors than white ones. Another study, analyzing common pairings of words in
American culture, found the words most frequently paired with the word “black” included “poor,” “violent,” “lazy,” and “dangerous.” Other
research has uncovered widely pervasive “aversive racism,” in which people who have sympathy for the injustices blacks have experienced in the
past nevertheless, as “normal” Americans, hold negative implicit biases against them. ¶ Near the end of the event, Jackson stressed the importance
of getting people to understand why they should care about inequities. “By 2040, this country will be a majority of minorities,” she said. “And,
even if you don’t care from a moral standpoint, if we [as a country] take on the health profile of minorities in this country, we’re in trouble
economically.”
Progress is occurring.
Clark, Catholic University law professor, 1995
[Leroy, 73 Denv. U.L. Rev. 23, “ARTICLE: A Critique of Professor Derrick A. Bell's Thesis of the
Permanence of Racism and His Strategy of Confrontation” Lexis]
The most thorough analysis of black-American status since Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma in
1944, is A Common Destiny--Blacks and American Society. n71 The report covers the period from 1940
through 1986, and is more comprehensive than the studies Professor Bell relied on in recent law review
articles.¶ A Common Destiny answers Professor Bell's central question in Faces:¶ Contemporary views of
the status of black-white relations in America vary widely. Perspectives range from optimism that the
main problems have been solved, to the view that black progress is largely an illusion, to assessments that
the nation is retrogressing and moving toward increased racial disparities. To some observers, the present
situation is only another episode in a long history of recurring cycles of apparent improvement that are
followed by new forms of dominance in changed contexts: the level of black status changes, it is said, but
the one constant is blacks' continuing subordinate social position. To other observers, the opposite is
correct: long-run progress is the dominant trend. n72¶ A Common Destiny, however, concludes that the
overwhelming majority of black-Americans made substantial progress since 1940:¶ Over the 50-year span
covered by this study, the social status of American blacks has on average improved dramatically, both in
absolute terms and relative to whites. The growth of the economy and public policies promoting racial
equality led to an erosion of segrega- tion and discrimination, making it possible for a substantial fraction
of blacks to enter the mainstream of American life. n73¶ Just five decades ago, most black Americans
could not work, live, shop, eat, seek entertainment, travel where they chose. Even a quarter century ago-100 years after the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863--most blacks were effectively denied the right to
vote. . . . Today the situation is very different. n74¶ The Committee acknowledged that "the great gulf that
existed between black and white Americans in 1939 . . . has not closed," because one-third of blacks "still
live in households with incomes below the poverty line." n75 Yet the study reported that 92% of blacks
lived below the poverty line in 1939. n76 A 60% drop in poverty is an astounding improvement, by any
measure, and is an even faster movement out of poverty than that of the white public that was also
suffering from the ravages of the economic depression of the 1930s. n77 Some reduction of black poverty
occurred when blacks secured higher paying jobs in defense industries during World War II. But the
passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act brought a significant reduction in racial employment discrimination.
By 1984, blacks had $ 9 billion more per year in real income, adjusted for inflation, than they would have
had if they had remained arrayed throughout the occupational spectrum as they were before the Act. n78
A new black economic elite developed through movement into higher paying employment in the private
sector and away from employment in government, the clergy, and civil rights organizations; this new elite
should sustain their progress and finance opportunities for their young. n79¶ The number of black elected
officials increased from a few dozen in 1940 to 6,800 by 1988, and the number of black public
administrators went from 1% in 1940 to 8% in 1980. n80 No white elected official has openly supported
racial segregation since Governor Wallace in the early 1960s, a testament, in part, to the substantial
increases in black voter registration and voting, due to the Voting Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, and 1965.
n81¶ One could also show decreases in racial segregation in education, housing, and other aspects of
American life, coupled with the virtual disappearance of racial exclusion in public accommodations--all
due to enforcement of the new legislation. It is true, racial discrimination has not been totally eradicated.
n82 But, Peter F. Drucker summarizes:¶ In the fifty years since the Second World War the economic
position of African-Americans in America has improved faster than that of any other group in American
social history--or in the social history of any country. Three-fifths of America's blacks rose into
middleclass incomes; before the Second World War the figure was onetwentieth. n83
EXTN – Links – Anti-Blackness
Rejecting the state in every instance is too sweeping and becomes self-fulfilling –
reformism has tangible benefits.
Clark, Catholic University law professor, 1995
[Leroy, 73 Denv. U.L. Rev. 23, “ARTICLE: A Critique of Professor Derrick A. Bell's Thesis of the
Permanence of Racism and His Strategy of Confrontation” Lexis]
A Final Word¶ Despite Professor Bell's prophecy of doom, I believe he would like to have his analysis proven wrong. However, he desperately
leans on a tactic from the past--laying out the disabilities of the black condition and accusing whites of not having the moral strength to act fairly.
That is the ultimate theme in both of his books and in much of his law review writing. That tactic not only lacks full force against today's complex
society, it also becomes, for many whites, an exaggerated claim that racism is the sole cause of black misfortunes. n146 Many whites may feel
about the black condition what many of us may have felt about the homeless: dismayed, but having no clear answer as to how the problem is to
be solved, and feeling individually powerless if the resolution calls for massive resources that we, personally, lack. Professor Bell's two books
may confirm this sense of powerlessness in whites with a limited background in this subject, because Professor Bell
does not offer a
single programmatic approach toward changing the circumstance of blacks. He presents only startling,
unanalyzed prophecies of doom, which will easily garner attention from a controversy-hungry media. n147¶ It is much harder
to exercise imagination to create viable strategies for change. n148 Professor Bell sensed the despair that the average-especially average black--reader would experience, so he put forth rhetoric urging an "unremitting struggle that leaves no
room for giving up." n149 His contention is ultimately hollow, given the total sweep of his work.¶ At
some point it becomes dysfunctional to refuse giving any credit to the very positive abatements of racism
that occurred with white support, and on occasion, white leadership. Racism thrives in an atmosphere of insecurity,
apprehension about the future, and inter-group resentments. Unrelenting, unqualified accusations only add to that negative atmosphere.
Empathetic and more generous responses are possible in an atmosphere of support, security, and a sense that advancement is possible; the
greatest progress of blacks occurred during the 1960s and early 1970s when the economy was expanding.
Professor Bell's "analysis" is really only accusation and "harassing white folks," and is undermining and
destructive. There is no love--except for his own group--and there is a constricted reach for an understanding of whites. There is only rage
and perplexity. No bridges are built--only righteousness is being sold.¶ A people, black or white, are capable only to the extent
they believe they are. Neither I, nor Professor Bell, have a crystal ball, but I do know that creativity and a drive for change
are very much linked to a belief that they are needed, and to a belief that they can make a difference. The
future will be shaped by past conditions and the actions of those over whom we have no control. Yet it is not fixed; it
will also be shaped by the attitudes and energy with which we face the future. Writing about race is to engage in a
power struggle. It is a non-neutral political act, and one must take responsibility for its consequences. Telling whites that they are
irremediably racist is not mere "information"; it is a force that helps create the future it predicts. If whites believe
the message, feelings of futility could overwhelm any further efforts to seek change. I am encouraged, however,
that the motto of the most articulate black spokesperson alive today, Jesse Jackson, is, "Keep hope alive!" and that much of the strength
of Martin Luther King, Jr. was his capacity to "dream" us toward a better place.
Progress is possible – ending slavery and civil rights prove – the quality of plans are
key which demonstrates the importance of decision-making.
Clark, Catholic University law professor, 1995
[Leroy, 73 Denv. U.L. Rev. 23, “ARTICLE: A Critique of Professor Derrick A. Bell's Thesis of the
Permanence of Racism and His Strategy of Confrontation” Lexis]
The History of Black Progress¶ I must now address the thesis that there has been no evolutionary progress
for blacks in America. Professor Bell concludes that blacks improperly read history if we believe, as
Americans in general believe, that progress--racial, in the case of blacks--is "linear and evolutionary." n49
According to Professor Bell, the "American dogma of automatic progress" has never applied to blacks.
n50 Blacks will never gain full equality, and "even those herculean efforts we hail as successful will
produce no more than temporary 'peaks of progress,' short-lived victories that slide into irrelevance." n51¶
Progress toward reducing racial discrimination and subordination has never been "automatic," if that
refers to some natural and inexorable process without struggle. Nor has progress ever been strictly
"linear" in terms of unvarying year by year improvement, because the combatants on either side of the
equality struggle have varied over time in their energies, resources, capacities, and the quality of their
plans. Moreover, neither side could predict or control all of the variables which accompany progress or
non-progress; some factors, like World War II, occurred in the international arena, and were not
exclusively under American control.¶ With these qualifications, and a long view of history, blacks and
their white allies achieved two profound and qualitatively different leaps forward toward the goal of
equality: the end of slavery, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Moreover, despite open and, lately, covert
resistance, black progress has never been shoved back, in a qualitative sense, to the powerlessness and
abuse of periods preceding these leaps forward. n52¶ The First Qualitative Leap¶ For two-thirds of
American history, African-Americans were, as a matter of law and practice, the property of white slaveholders from birth until death. Professor Bell commented on the ending of this institution: "Two centuries
after the Constitution's adoption, we did live in a far more enlightened world. Slavery was no more." n53¶
That must be the most tepid understatement ever about the ending of the most violent and debasing
condition that blacks ever suffered in this country. Slaves worked six and sometimes seven days a week.
Idle slaves could be flogged, and some were maimed after a failed escape. Families were separated, and
black females were forced into sexual concubinage. Slaves owned nothing, their movement was strictly
circumscribed, and they were kept illiterate as another form of control. n54¶ Ending this degrading
institution was a profound qualitative leap toward freedom, and it was never reversed. White southerners
did regain control of the legislatures, and imposed racial segregation. Racial segregation, however, was a
far cry from the total domination of slavery. Moreover, blacks seized the opportunity to take many steps,
within the confines of segregation, that became the seeds of the next great leap forward into freedom in
the 1950s and 1960s. The newly freed blacks trekked North and West--not an option under slavery--and
there gained critical political leverage. n55 Independent black churches, possible only after the Civil War,
developed a debate between a conservative wing concerned with the hereafter, and a more progressive
wing that sought to use the church as an agency for ameliorating the constrictions in black life. n56 From
the latter, one Martin Luther King sprang forth, galvanizing blacks and the whole nation for the next leap
towards freedom.¶ During Reconstruction, black legislators established a free public school system. Even
though whites imposed segregation on the public schools, they did not abolish them. By 1900, 1.5 million
black children were overcoming the illiteracy imposed on their parents and grandparents in slavery. n57¶
Shortly after the imposition of racial segregation, blacks turned to the United States Supreme Court for
relief from its legal strictures. There were losses at first, the most notable being Plessy v. Ferguson, n58
upholding racial segregation under the "separate but equal" doctrine. As blacks gained more
organizational sophistication, the Court, gradually but progressively, struck down segregation in voting,
n59 in housing, n60 and in graduate schools. n61 The culmination was Brown v. Board of Education, n62
which fully repudiated the Plessy doctrine and held that state sanctioned racial segregation violated the
14th Amendment.¶ Second Qualitative Leap Forward¶ The black-led, and white-supported, civil rights
movement gathered momentum in the late 1950s and early 1960s through marches, "sit-ins"--which
breached racial segregation in public establishments--and the development of legal strategies to provide
cover and protection. White Americans were shocked by the vicious resistance of small pockets of rabid
southern racists to the disciplined non-violent protests of blacks, and public opinion began to move
toward support for racial equality. n63 Key whites in the media, especially television, influenced this shift
in public opinion by portraying black grievances in a sympathetic and appealing light. n64 The movement
culminated in 1960s legislation prohibiting racial segregation and discrimination in public
accommodations, n65 employment, n66 voting rights, n67 and housing. n68 This was the next qualitative
leap forward, and there has been no massive backsliding into the rank forms of segregation and
discrimination that characterized the pre-1960 period.¶ Professor Bell treats the post-1960s claims of
progress as an illusion: discrimination simply became more covert, but equally efficient. n69 The facts,
however, viewed with a holistic perspective, largely refute this claim. n70
Totalizing resistance fails – the only option becomes symbolic action which is no
different from the sqo.
Clark, Catholic University law professor, 1995
[Leroy, 73 Denv. U.L. Rev. 23, “ARTICLE: A Critique of Professor Derrick A. Bell's Thesis of the
Permanence of Racism and His Strategy of Confrontation” Lexis]
Bell's Confrontation Model¶ Broad-based, cooperative activity is, however, the antithesis of the model of
the single heroic individual that Professor Bell admires so much in Confronting Authority. Professor Bell
cannot advance the solo confrontation as a superior strategic approach, so he offers the solace of knowing
that one acted with integrity. That is not enough for most of us, and certainly not enough for blacks as a
people. If a situation is truly unfair, discriminatory, or oppressive, we are obligated to pay careful
attention to the strategy for changing it, or we must accept the fact that our actions are basically futile-however much we seek to congratulate ourselves for our courage. n134¶ Professor Bell cites Paul Robeson
and Martin Luther King, Jr. as exemplars of his model for singular courage. From my perspective, they
functioned in almost diametrically opposite fashions. Paul Robeson fits Professor Bell's model of a man
of courage who took on the white society and the "powers that be" in open confrontation, and in often
highly symbolic action. He all but adopted support of Marxism in a time when anti-communist hysteria
was high, and he sacrificed his profession and career as an artist. One might respect Paul Robeson, but we
must be candid about his strategic failures. He supported a doctrine which failed in the countries he
thought were superior to America, he was not largely embraced by the black community, and he had no
massive impact in terms of changing the institutions that oppressed the black community. n135¶ Martin
Luther King cannot be described in any of those terms. King always worked well within the context of the
black masses and, indeed, drew his strength from their allegiance to him. He worked within a spiritual and
religious context that was familiar to and supported by his followers. King possessed individual courage
n136 and integrity, but he was not a "solo actor." He was counseled, and actually influenced, by members
of his organization and a few whites outside the organization. n137 He also carefully attended to strategy
and the need to bring persons to a level of action and cooperation. Both King and Robeson were
concerned about the excesses of uncontrolled capitalism, but only King had the strategic sense and
capacity to start a "Poor People's Campaign." King was not interested in some defiant gesture of rubbing
the noses of white Americans in their racism. King invited whites to join in a direction that would do as
much for their moral and material welfare as it would for blacks. Because of his perspective, King
developed a viable, active movement involving a broad spectrum of blacks and whites. King, therefore,
unlike Robeson or anyone who would emulate Bell's singular confrontation model, achieved a profound
change in the level of discrimination and oppression experienced by blacks. n138
Using the state is necessary.
Magee Andrews, University of San Francisco law professor, 2003
[Rhonda, 54 Ala. L. Rev. 483, “ARTICLE: The Third Reconstruction: An Alternative to Race
Consciousness and Colorblindness in Post-Slavery America” Lexis]
The following argument relies on a few important assumptions. The first is the assumption that legal rules
have consequences that reach far beyond their intended application from the standpoint of legal analysis.
Legal rules play an important part in shaping concrete and metaphysical aspects of the world that we
know. Thus, the impact of equal protection doctrine on the meta-narrative of race in America is more than
merely symbolic. The Supreme Court's pronouncements on race are presumptively to be followed by
lower courts, and together these opinions and their consequences influence the representations of race in
federal and state social policies, in the media, in literature, and in the arts. n18 As Justice Brennan noted
from the bench, every decision of the court has "ripples" which impact society and social processes. n19¶
Perhaps in no other area is this basic sociological insight more demonstrably true than in the area of race
law. In a very real sense, the history of American civil rights law is the history of America's socio-legal
construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction of what it means to be a constitutionally protected human
being. In the aftermath of the war required to preserve the Union itself, the architects of the First
Reconstruction n20 took on [*491] the task of reforming the Constitution to provide federal protection for
newly "freed" Americans. The law they made not only created a new world in which the centuries-old
institution of slavery was virtually impossible, n21 but perhaps more importantly, marked the beginning
of the reshaping of American thinking about the very nature of humanity through the powerful symbolism
and mechanisms of the law. n22 Thus, the continuing evolution of what it means to be a human being,
and refinement of the state's obligations to human beings subject to its laws, are among the most
significant of the unstated objectives of the reconstruction of post-slavery America, and the law itself will
play a central role.
This is the only comparative piece of evidence in the debate – the state materially
benefits black people more than their strategy.
Clark, Catholic University law professor, 1995
[Leroy, 73 Denv. U.L. Rev. 23, “ARTICLE: A Critique of Professor Derrick A. Bell's Thesis of the
Permanence of Racism and His Strategy of Confrontation” Lexis]
Goals for the Future¶ The desirable economic goals are clear. There
must be a redistribution of wealth, by means which the
majority of the public see as benefiting them; thus, race-specific affirmative action plans will play a minor role. n139 We must reduce
poverty and banish unemployment for the unskilled as well as for professionals. We must retard the loss in real
wages, so that a person's income can fulfill the basic needs for shelter, food, medical care, and education. Very importantly, we need to
enhance dignity in the workplace and remove the insecurity that employment can be lost precipitously.¶
How should we pursue these simple, clearly beneficial goals? Many civil rights lawyers, myself included, are probably closet leftists who were
surprised by the massive collapse of the economies of the major socialist countries. We must now educate ourselves through the economists and
non-lawyers writing about the prospects for economic justice in a private property economy. Charles Derber recently outlined a way to pursue
the beneficial goals identified above, because of interesting developments in the business sector. n140 He points
out, however, that
"progressives of all stripes, as well as much of the population, have been seduced by the politics of the
'cultural wars' and have left economics to the economists, with the attendant negative consequences." n141 He also notes
that black, women's, and other movements have engaged in "a shift from economic and class issues to identity-based cultural politics," thereby
ceding the field of economic restructuring to the business sector. n142 ¶ Derber claims that American business is moving in two fundamentally
contradictory directions. One is "contingent capitalism," which can "intensify greed, social dislocation, ugly racial divisions and extreme class
inequality." The other is "cooperative capitalism," which "offers the seeds of a new idea of community in America and a potential solution to the
specters of violence, family dissolution, poverty, and social breakdown that haunt the nation." n143 ¶ In cooperative capitalism, a business creates
loyalty in its work force and customers by a commitment to shared values in the community, which sometimes takes precedent over profits. The
business empowers workers, giving them more autonomy in how work is performed. Organizational decisions are made jointly by management
and labor, thus reducing the need for a tier of supervisors to engage in surveillance. Various forms of employee-owned businesses are developing,
as an outgrowth and extension of this approach. n144¶ Derber warns, however, that "contingency capitalism" is a wholly contradictory direction
that is competing with cooperative capitalism. Here, businesses replace permanent workers with contingents who are temporary, part-time, or
designated as "independent contractors"--a designation which allows employers to avoid paying social security taxes for the worker. Secondly,
companies further reduce the core of permanent employees through downsizing and contracting out, thus disrupting expectations of continued
long-term employment. Finally, the corporations cut back on long-term, fixed obligations to employees, and revert to speed-ups and management
by stress.¶ Derber believes that we are at a critical crossroads regarding the structure of the economy, and that there
are legislative
measures which can encourage and support the cooperative capitalism direction. He believes that President Clinton's
communitarian concerns could be realized through his embracing cooperative capitalism and informing the American public of
these two fundamentally different directions facing the nation. Derber concludes that "the ultimate success of [the black, women's, and other
identity movements] and those of progressive citizens and community groups, depends on coalescing around a movement for a new genuinely
democratic and cooperative economy." n145
Progress Possible – History
Progress is possible – ending slavery and civil rights prove – the quality of plans are
key which demonstrates the importance of decision-making.
Clark, Catholic University law professor, 1995
[Leroy, 73 Denv. U.L. Rev. 23, “ARTICLE: A Critique of Professor Derrick A. Bell's Thesis of the
Permanence of Racism and His Strategy of Confrontation” Lexis]
The History of Black Progress¶ I must now address the thesis that there has been no evolutionary progress
for blacks in America. Professor Bell concludes that blacks improperly read history if we believe, as
Americans in general believe, that progress--racial, in the case of blacks--is "linear and evolutionary." n49
According to Professor Bell, the "American dogma of automatic progress" has never applied to blacks.
n50 Blacks will never gain full equality, and "even those herculean efforts we hail as successful will
produce no more than temporary 'peaks of progress,' short-lived victories that slide into irrelevance." n51¶
Progress toward reducing racial discrimination and subordination has never been "automatic," if that
refers to some natural and inexorable process without struggle. Nor has progress ever been strictly
"linear" in terms of unvarying year by year improvement, because the combatants on either side of the
equality struggle have varied over time in their energies, resources, capacities, and the quality of their
plans. Moreover, neither side could predict or control all of the variables which accompany progress or
non-progress; some factors, like World War II, occurred in the international arena, and were not
exclusively under American control.¶ With these qualifications, and a long view of history, blacks and
their white allies achieved two profound and qualitatively different leaps forward toward the goal of
equality: the end of slavery, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Moreover, despite open and, lately, covert
resistance, black progress has never been shoved back, in a qualitative sense, to the powerlessness and
abuse of periods preceding these leaps forward. n52¶ The First Qualitative Leap¶ For two-thirds of
American history, African-Americans were, as a matter of law and practice, the property of white slaveholders from birth until death. Professor Bell commented on the ending of this institution: "Two centuries
after the Constitution's adoption, we did live in a far more enlightened world. Slavery was no more." n53¶
That must be the most tepid understatement ever about the ending of the most violent and debasing
condition that blacks ever suffered in this country. Slaves worked six and sometimes seven days a week.
Idle slaves could be flogged, and some were maimed after a failed escape. Families were separated, and
black females were forced into sexual concubinage. Slaves owned nothing, their movement was strictly
circumscribed, and they were kept illiterate as another form of control. n54¶ Ending this degrading
institution was a profound qualitative leap toward freedom, and it was never reversed. White southerners
did regain control of the legislatures, and imposed racial segregation. Racial segregation, however, was a
far cry from the total domination of slavery. Moreover, blacks seized the opportunity to take many steps,
within the confines of segregation, that became the seeds of the next great leap forward into freedom in
the 1950s and 1960s. The newly freed blacks trekked North and West--not an option under slavery--and
there gained critical political leverage. n55 Independent black churches, possible only after the Civil War,
developed a debate between a conservative wing concerned with the hereafter, and a more progressive
wing that sought to use the church as an agency for ameliorating the constrictions in black life. n56 From
the latter, one Martin Luther King sprang forth, galvanizing blacks and the whole nation for the next leap
towards freedom.¶ During Reconstruction, black legislators established a free public school system. Even
though whites imposed segregation on the public schools, they did not abolish them. By 1900, 1.5 million
black children were overcoming the illiteracy imposed on their parents and grandparents in slavery. n57¶
Shortly after the imposition of racial segregation, blacks turned to the United States Supreme Court for
relief from its legal strictures. There were losses at first, the most notable being Plessy v. Ferguson, n58
upholding racial segregation under the "separate but equal" doctrine. As blacks gained more
organizational sophistication, the Court, gradually but progressively, struck down segregation in voting,
n59 in housing, n60 and in graduate schools. n61 The culmination was Brown v. Board of Education, n62
which fully repudiated the Plessy doctrine and held that state sanctioned racial segregation violated the
14th Amendment.¶ Second Qualitative Leap Forward¶ The black-led, and white-supported, civil rights
movement gathered momentum in the late 1950s and early 1960s through marches, "sit-ins"--which
breached racial segregation in public establishments--and the development of legal strategies to provide
cover and protection. White Americans were shocked by the vicious resistance of small pockets of rabid
southern racists to the disciplined non-violent protests of blacks, and public opinion began to move
toward support for racial equality. n63 Key whites in the media, especially television, influenced this shift
in public opinion by portraying black grievances in a sympathetic and appealing light. n64 The movement
culminated in 1960s legislation prohibiting racial segregation and discrimination in public
accommodations, n65 employment, n66 voting rights, n67 and housing. n68 This was the next qualitative
leap forward, and there has been no massive backsliding into the rank forms of segregation and
discrimination that characterized the pre-1960 period.¶ Professor Bell treats the post-1960s claims of
progress as an illusion: discrimination simply became more covert, but equally efficient. n69 The facts,
however, viewed with a holistic perspective, largely refute this claim. n70
Progress Possible – Public Opinion
Yes – change through the state is possible – public opinion makes it so.
Clark, Catholic University law professor, 1995
[Leroy, 73 Denv. U.L. Rev. 23, “ARTICLE: A Critique of Professor Derrick A. Bell's Thesis of the
Permanence of Racism and His Strategy of Confrontation” Lexis]
I doubt that Professor Bell believes that racial discrimination should have totally disappeared. But what, then, accounts for Professor Bell's
statements that "the civil rights gains, so hard won, are being steadily eroded"; that it has been "more than a decade of civil rights setbacks in the
White House, and in the courts"; n84 and that the civil rights movement is "a movement now brought to a virtual halt"? n85¶ Professor Bell
was not looking at the total sweep of black progress since the 1960s, but was dismayed by the hostility
towards--or lack of support for--civil rights displayed during the twelve years of the Reagan and Bush
administrations. n86 Ex-president Jimmy Carter appointed a record number of black attorneys to the federal courts. n87 Reagan and Bush
returned to the old style, appointing few minorities and women to the federal bench. Further, their appointees often proved unsympathetic to the
arguments of civil rights organizations. n88 Reagan and Bush were the only presidents who opposed passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and
the only presidents who vetoed civil rights legislation in the 20th century. n89 They also used subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, "racial codes"
to covertly organize whites to break the Democratic party's hold on the presidency, especially in the South. n90 ¶ Even
given this
executive branch hostility to civil rights, the Congress, the branch of government much more vulnerable
to the electorate, consistently and successfully opposed or reversed actions that undermined civil rights.
Congress amended and improved the Voting Rights Act in 1982. n91 Congress overrode the veto of one of the most popular presidents in modern
times, Reagan, and passed the Civil Rights Restoration Act in 1986. n92 The enforcement machinery of the Fair Housing Act, prohibiting racial
discrimination in the sale or rental of housing, was substantially improved by amendment in 1988. n93 A bill barring discrimination in
employment and public accommodations for the disabled, a disproportionate number of which are blacks, passed in 1990. n94 ¶ The
major
"setbacks," to which Professor Bell refers, were several United States Supreme Court cases which limited the
scope of statutes prohibiting discrimination in employment, or which created proof problems for
plaintiffs. n95 Congress passed a bill in 1991 which reversed all of the adverse decisions by the Court. n96
This history of Congressional repudiation of executive and judicial hostility to civil rights and, indeed, the extension of civil rights to new areas,
is not noted in either of Professor Bell's two books. n97¶ Why, if society is as irremediably racist as Professor Bell alleges, can Congress,
which constantly sounds out the public, confidently
pass this wide range of pro-civil rights legislation? The answer is that
the overwhelming majority of white Americans underwent attitude changes in the last thirty years,
generally relinquishing crude or unadulterated racial prejudice. A majority of whites no longer believe in
the racial inferiority of blacks, and believe blacks should not be discriminated against in employment,
schools, and access to public and private accommodations. n98 Professor Bell's books contain no mention of the extensive
opinion poll data showing less racial prejudice. Indeed, his books, especially Confronting Authority, portray the white public as massively, and
often incomprehensibly and stupidly, committed to racism.
AT: Progress Impossible – Right Cooptation Turn
Access args get coopted by the right to fortify exclusion.
Patterson, Harvard University sociology professor, 1998
[Orlando, “The Ordeal Of Integration: Progress And Resentment In America's "Racial" Crisis”
http://books.google.com/books?id=W4d8ghK2H8C&q=In+the+attempt+to+understand+and+come+to+terms+with+#v=snippet&q=In%20the
%20attempt%20to%20understand%20and%20come%20to%20terms%20with&f=false, p.ix-x]
In the attempt to understand and come to terms with the problems of Afro-Americans and of their
interethnic relations, the country has been ill served by its intellectuals, policy advocates, and leaders in
recent years. At present, dogmatic ethnic advocates and extremists appear to dominate discourse on the
subject, drowning out both moderate and other dissenting voices.¶ A strange convergence has emerged
between these extremists. On the left, the nation is misled by an endless stream of tracts and studies that
deny any meaningful change in America's "Two Nations," decry "The Myth of Black Progress," mourn
"The Dream Deferred," dismiss AfroAmerican middle-class status as "Volunteer Slavery," pronounce
AfroAmerican men an "Endangered Species," and apocalyptically announce "The Coming Race War."
On the right is complete agreement with this dismal portrait in which we are fast "Losing Ground,"
except that the road to "racial" hell, according to conservatives, has been paved by the very policies
intended to help solve the problem, abetted by "The Dream and the Nightmare" of cultural changes in the
sixties and by the overbreeding and educational integration of inferior Afro-Americans and very policies
intended to help solve the problem, abetted by "The Dream and the Nightmare" of cultural changes in the
sixties and by the overbreeding and educational integration of inferior Afro-Americans and lower-class
Euro-Americans genetically situated on the wrong tail of the IQ "Bell Curve." ¶ If it is true that a "racial
crisis" persists in America, this crisis is as much one of perception and interpretation as of actual
socioeconomic and interethnic realities. By any measure, the record of the past half century has been
one of great achievement, thanks in good part to the suecess of the government policies now being
maligned by the left for not having gone far enough and by the right for having both failed and gone
too far. At the same time, there is still no room for complacency: because our starting point half a century
ago was so deplorably backward, we still have some way to go before approaching anything like a
resolution.
AT: Civil Rights Act Bad
Even if the Civil Rights Act wasn’t perfect, it is disingenuous to say it was worthless
– it required massive effort and did produce some value.
Roithmayr, University of Illinois College of law assistant law professor, 2001
[Daria, 22 Cardozo Law Review 1113, “CRITICAL LEGAL POLITICS: LEFT VS. MPM: LEFT OVER
RIGHTS” Lexis]
In contrast to the earlier cls position, Critique puts forward a "minimalist" indeterminacy critique that
is much less corrosive. n34 It is not that rights discourse is always indeterminate and can never
produce closure. Although rights discourse does frequently fail to reach closure, at other times and in
other (rare) circumstances, rights actually have appeared to produce some sort of useful result or
determinate outcome. n35 But in neither case has the discourse succeeded or failed because rights
categorically trump other competing claims. Rather, Kennedy argues that the success or failure of a
rights claim depends on a range of political forces that cannot be predicted in advance. That is, a
successful rights argument depends not on the "scope" of the right or its application to a set of facts,
but on a less-than-formulaic interpretive relationship between the rights claim, the identity and
diligence of the rights claimer, the political viability of supporting arguments, timing, and luck, among
other factors. n36 Kennedy agrees with CRT argument that rights has produced value in the context
of the civil rights movement, and is quick to note that his newly minimalist rights critique did not
constitute an indictment of the civil rights era. n37 He does not intend to suggest that communities of
color had been wrong or misguided to use rights as part of a demand for inclusion. n38 Rather, he
seeks to remind them that their success has been a matter of hard work, chance, and historical
circumstance - they have succeeded not because rights are somehow categorically distinct from
nonrights political interests, but because their timing during the civil rights era had been great,
rights discourse had taken on a particularly [*1119] liberatory meaning at a particular time, and
they had worked extraordinarily hard to organize politically. n39
AT: Wilderson Rejects Political Change
Wilderson’s scholarship isn’t intended to preclude goal-oriented political change
Wilderson, University of California Irvine African American studies and drama
professor, 2010
[Frank III, “Panel on Literary Activism” http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/id/222448, begins at
roughly 49:10]
Typically what I mean when I ask myself whether or not people will like or accept my reading, what I'm really trying to say to myself whether or not people will like
or accept me and this is a difficult thing to overcome especially for a black writer because we
are not just black writers, we are black
people and as black people we live every day of our lives in an anti-black world. A world that defines itself in a
very fundamental ways in constant distinction from us, we live everyday of our lives in a context of daily
rejection so it’s understandable that we as black writers might strive for acceptance and appreciation through our
writing, as I said this gets us tangled up in the result. The lessons that we have to learn as writers resonate with what I want to say about literature and political
struggle. I am a political writer which is to say my writing is self-consciously about radical change, but when I have
worked as an activist in political movements, my labor has been intentional and goal oriented. For example, I
organized, with a purpose to say free Mumia Abu Jamal, to free all political prisoners, or to abolish the prison industrial
complex here in the United States or in South Africa, I have worked to abolish apartheid and unsuccessfully to set up a
socialist state whereas I want my poetry and my fiction, my creative non-fiction and my theoretical writing to resonate with and to
impact and to be impacted by those tangible and identifiable results , I think that something really debilitating will happen to the writing, that
it the writing will be hobbled if and when I become clear about the ways in which I want my writing to have
an impact on political struggle. What I am trying to say when I say that I want to be unclear, that I don't
want to clarify, I do not want to clarify the impact that my work will have or should have on political struggle, is that the
relationship of literature to struggle is not one of causality but one of accompaniment , when I write I want to
hold my political beliefs and my political agenda loosely. I want to look at my political life the way I might look at a solar eclipse which is to say look indirectly, look
arie, in this way I
might be able to liberate my imagination and go to places in the writing that I and other black people go
are too dangerous to go to and too dangerous to speak about when one is trying to
organize people to take risks or when a political organization is presenting a list of demands, I said at the
to all the time, the places that
beginning this is an anti-black world. Its anti-black in places I hate like apartheid South Africa and apartheid America and it’s anti-black in the places I don't hate such
as Cuba, I've
been involved with some really radical political movements but none of them have called for
an end of the world but if I can get out of the way from the result of my writing, if I can think of my
writing as something that accompanies political struggle as opposed to something that will cause
political struggle then maybe just maybe I will be able to explore forbidden territory, the unspoken demands that the world come to an end, the thing that I
can’t say when I am trying to organize maybe I can harness the energy of the political movement to make breakthroughs in the imagination that the movement can't
always accommodate, if its to maintain its organizational capacity.
***Natives***
Frontline – Natives
Trends point toward greater equality – progress is slow and steady.
Beauchamp, Think Progress, 12-11-13
[Zack, “5 Reasons Why 2013 Was The Best Year In Human”
http://thinkprogress.org/security/2013/12/11/3036671/2013-certainly-year-human-history/, accessed
1-20-14, TAP]
Between the brutal civil war in Syria, the government shutdown and all of the deadly dysfunction it represents, the NSA spying revelations, and
massive inequality, it’d be easy to for you to enter 2014 thinking the last year has been an awful one.¶ But you’d be wrong. We have every
reason to believe that 2013
was, in fact, the best year on the planet for humankind.¶ Contrary to what you might have
heard, virtually all of the most important forces that determine what make people’s lives good — the things
that determine how long they live, and whether they live happily and freely — are trending in an extremely happy direction.
While it’s possible that this progress could be reversed by something like runaway climate change, the effects will
have to be dramatic to overcome the extraordinary and growing progress we’ve made in making the
world a better place.¶ Here’s the five big reasons why.¶ 1. Fewer people are dying young, and more are living
longer.¶ India Polio¶ CREDIT: AP PHOTO/MAHESH KUMAR¶ The greatest story in recent human history is the simplest:
we’re winning the fight against death. “There is not a single country in the world where infant or child
mortality today is not lower than it was in 1950,” writes Angus Deaton, a Princeton economist who
works on global health issues.¶ The most up-to-date numbers on global health, the 2013 World Health Organization (WHO)
statistical compendium, confirm Deaton’s estimation. Between 1990 and 2010, the percentage of children who died before their fifth
birthday dropped by almost half. Measles deaths declined by 71 percent, and both tuberculosis and maternal deaths by half again. HIV, that
modern plague, is also being held back, with deaths from AIDS-related illnesses down by 24 percent since 2005.¶ In short, fewer people are
dying untimely deaths. And that’s
not only true in rich countries: life expectancy has gone up between 1990 and
2011 in every WHO income bracket. The gains are even more dramatic if you take the long view: global life expectancy was 47 in
the early 1950s, but had risen to 70 — a 50 percent jump — by 2011. For even more perspective, the average Briton in 1850 — when the British
Empire had reached its apex — was 40. The average person today should expect to live almost twice as long as the average citizen of the
world’s wealthiest and most powerful country in 1850.¶ In real terms, this means millions of fewer dead adults and children a year, millions
fewer people who spend their lives suffering the pains and unfreedoms imposed by illness, and millions more people spending their twilight
years with loved ones. And the trends are all positive — “progress has accelerated in recent years in many countries with the highest rates of
mortality,” as the WHO rather bloodlessly put it.¶ What’s going on? Obviously, it’s fairly complicated, but the
most important drivers
have been technological and political innovation. The Enlightenment-era advances in the scientific
method got people doing high-quality research, which brought us modern medicine and the information
technologies that allow us to spread medical breakthroughs around the world at increasingly faster
rates. Scientific discoveries also fueled the Industrial Revolution and the birth of modern capitalism,
giving us more resources to devote to large-scale application of live-saving technologies. And the global
spread of liberal democracy made governments accountable to citizens, forcing them to attend to their
health needs or pay the electoral price.¶ We’ll see the enormously beneficial impact of these two forces, technology and
democracy, repeatedly throughout this list, which should tell you something about the foundations of human progress. But when talking about
improvements in health, we shouldn’t neglect foreign aid. Nations donating huge amounts of money out of an altruistic interest in the welfare
of foreigners is historically unprecedented, and while not all aid has been helpful, health aid has been a huge boon.¶ Even Deaton, who wrote
one of 2013′s harshest assessments of foreign aid, believes “the case for assistance to fight disease such as HIV/AIDS or smallpox is strong.”
That’s because these programs have demonstrably saved lives — the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), a 2003 program
pushed by President Bush, paid for anti-retroviral treatment for over 5.1 million people in the poor countries hardest-hit by the AIDS epidemic.¶
So we’re
outracing the Four Horseman, extending our lives faster than pestilence, war, famine, and death can take them. That
alone should be enough to say the world is getting better.¶ 2. Fewer people suffer from extreme
poverty, and the world is getting happier.¶ APTOPIX India Maha Kumbh¶ CREDIT: SAURABH DAS/AP PHOTO¶ There are
fewer people in abject penury than at any other point in human history, and middle class people enjoy
their highest standard of living ever. We haven’t come close to solving poverty: a number of African countries in
particular have chronic problems generating growth, a nut foreign aid hasn’t yet cracked. So this isn’t a call for complacency about
poverty any more than acknowledging victories over disease is an argument against tackling malaria. But make no mistake: as a
whole, the world is much richer in 2013 than it was before.¶ 721 million fewer people lived in extreme
poverty ($1.25 a day) in 2010 than in 1981, according to a new World Bank study from October. That’s
astounding — a decline from 40 to about 14 percent of the world’s population suffering from abject
want. And poverty rates are declining in every national income bracket: even in low income countries, the
percentage of people living in extreme poverty ($1.25 a day in 2005 dollars) a day gone down from 63 in 1981 to 44 in 2010.¶ We can be fairly
confident that these trends are continuing. For one thing, they survived the Great Recession in 2008. For another, the decline in poverty has
been fueled by global economic growth, which looks to be continuing: global GDP grew by 2.3 percent in 2012, a number that’ll rise to 2.9
percent in 2013 according to IMF projections.¶ The bulk of the recent decline in poverty comes form India and China — about 80 percent from
China *alone*. Chinese economic and social reform, a delayed reaction to the mass slaughter and starvation of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, has
been the engine of poverty’s global decline. If you subtract China, there are actually more poor people today than there were in 1981
(population growth trumping the percentage declines in poverty).¶ But we shouldn’t discount China. If what we care about is fewer people
suffering the misery of poverty, then it shouldn’t matter what nation the less-poor people call home. Chinese growth should be celebrated, not
shunted aside.¶ The
poor haven’t been the only people benefitting from global growth. Middle class people
have access to an ever-greater stock of life-improving goods. Televisions and refrigerators, once luxury goods, are now
comparatively cheap and commonplace. That’s why large-percentage improvements in a nation’s GDP appear to correlate strongly with higher
levels of happiness among the nation’s citizens; people like having things that make their lives easier and more worry-free.¶ Global economic
growth in the past five decades has dramatically reduced poverty and made people around the world happier. Once again, we’re better off.¶
3. War is becoming rarer and less deadly.¶ APTOPIX Mideast Libya¶ CREDIT: AP PHOTO/ MANU BRABO¶ Another massive
conflict could overturn the global progress against disease and poverty. But it appears war, too, may be losing its fangs.¶ Steven Pinker’s
2011 book The Better Angels Of Our Nature is the gold standard in this debate. Pinker brought a treasure trove of
data to bear on the question of whether the world has gotten more peaceful, and found that, in the long arc of
human history, both war and other forms of violence (the death penalty, for instance) are on a
centuries-long downward slope.¶ Pinker summarizes his argument here if you don’t own the book. Most eye-popping are
the numbers for the past 50 years; Pinker finds that “the worldwide rate of death from interstate and
civil war combined has juddered downward…from almost 300 per 100,000 world population during
World War II, to almost 30 during the Korean War, to the low teens during the era of the Vietnam War,
to single digits in the 1970s and 1980s, to less than 1 in the twenty-first century.” Here’s what that looks like
graphed:¶ Pinker¶ CREDIT: STEVEN PINKER/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL¶ So it looks like the smallest percentage of humans alive
since World War II, and in all likelihood in human history, are living through the horrors of war. Did 2013 give us any reason
to believe that Pinker and the other scholars who agree with him have been proven wrong?¶ Probably not. The academic debate over the
decline of war really exploded in 2013, but the “declinist” thesis has fared pretty well. Challenges
to Pinker’s conclusion that battle
deaths have gone down over time have not withstood scrutiny. The most compelling critique, a new paper by Bear F. Braumoeller,
argues that if you control for the larger number of countries in the last 50 years, war happens at roughly the same rates as it has historically.¶
There are lots of things you might say about Braumoeller’s argument, and I’ve asked Pinker for his two cents (update: Pinker’s response here).
But most importantly, if battle deaths per 100,000 people really has declined, then his argument doesn’t mean very much. If
(percentagewise) fewer people are dying from war, then what we call “war” now is a lot less deadly than “war” used
to be. Braumoeller suggests population growth and improvements in battle medicine explain the decline, but that’s not convincing: tell me
with a straight face that the only differences in deadliness between World War II, Vietnam, and the wars you see today is that there are more
people and better doctors.¶ There’s a more rigorous way of putting that: today,
we see many more civil wars than we do
wars between nations. The former tend to be less deadly than the latter. That’s why the other major challenge to Pinker’s
thesis in 2013, the deepening of the Syrian civil war, isn’t likely to upset the overall trend. Syria’s war is an unimaginable
tragedy, one responsible for the rare, depressing increase in battle deaths from 2011 to 2012. However, the overall 2011-2012 trend
“fits well with the observed long-term decline in battle deaths,” according to researchers at the
authoritative Uppsala Conflict Data Program, because the uptick is not enough to suggest an overall
change in trend. We should expect something similar when the 2013 numbers are published.¶ Why are smaller and smaller percentages
of people being exposed to the horrors of war? There are lots of reasons one could point to, but two of the biggest ones are the spread of
democracy and humans getting, for lack of a better word, better.¶ That democracies never, or almost never, go to war with each other is not
seriously in dispute: the statistical evidence is ridiculously strong. While some argue that the “democratic peace,” as it’s called, is caused by
things other than democracy itself, there’s
good experimental evidence that democratic leaders and citizens just
don’t want to fight each other.¶ Since 1950, democracy has spread around the world like wildfire. There
were only a handful of democracies after World War II, but that grew to roughly 40 percent of all by the end of the Cold War. Today, a
comfortable majority — about 60 percent — of all states are democracies. This freer world is also a safer one.¶ Second — and this is Pinker’s
preferred explanation — people have developed strategies for dealing with war’s causes and consequences. “Human ingenuity and experience
have gradually been brought to bear,” Pinker writes, “just as they have chipped away at hunger and disease.” A series of human inventions,
things like U.N. peacekeeping operations, which nowadays are very successful at reducing violence, have given us a set of social tools
increasingly well suited to reducing the harm caused by armed conflict.¶ War’s decline isn’t accidental, in other words. It’s by design.¶
4.
Rates of murder and other violent crimes are in free-fall.¶ Britain Unrest¶ CREDIT: AKIRA SUEMORI/AP PHOTOS¶
Pinker’s trend against violence isn’t limited just to war. It seems likes crimes, both of the sort states
commit against their citizens and citizens commit against each other, are also on the decline.¶ Take a few
examples. Slavery, once commonly sanctioned by governments, is illegal everywhere on earth. The use of torture as legal
punishment has gone down dramatically. The European murder rate fell 35-fold from the Middle Ages to
the beginning of the 20th century (check out this amazing 2003 paper from Michael Eisner, who dredged up medieval records to
estimate European homicide rates in the swords-and-chivalry era, if you don’t believe me).¶ The decline has been especially marked in recent
years. Though homicide crime rates climbed back up from their historic lows between the 1970s and 1990s, reversing progress made since the
late 19th century, they have collapsed worldwide in the 21st century. 557,000
people were murdered in 2001 — almost
three times as many as were killed in war that year. In 2008, that number was 289,000, and the
homicide rate has been declining in 75 percent of nations since then.¶ Statistics from around the developed world,
where numbers are particularly reliable, show that it’s not just homicide that’s on the wane: it’s almost all violent
crime. US government numbers show that violent crime in the United States declined from a peak of about 750 crimes per 100,000
Americans to under 450 by 2009. G7 as a whole countries show huge declines in homicide, robbery, and vehicle theft.¶ So even in countries
that aren’t at poor or at war, most people’s lives are getting safer and more secure. Why?¶ We know it’s not incarceration. While the United
States and Britain have dramatically increased their prison populations, others, like Canada, the Netherlands, and Estonia, reduced their
incarceration rates and saw similar declines in violent crime. Same thing state-to-state in the United States; New York imprisoned fewer people
and saw the fastest crime decline in the country.¶ The Economist’s deep dive into the explanations for crime’s collapse provides a few answers.
Globally, police have gotten better at working with communities and targeting areas with the most crime. They’ve also gotten new toys, like
DNA testing, that make it easier to catch criminals.¶ The crack epidemic in the United States and its heroin twin in Europe have both slowed
down dramatically. Rapid gentrification has made inner-city crime harder. And the increasing cheapness of “luxury” goods like iPods and DVD
players has reduced incentives for crime on both the supply and demand sides: stealing a DVD player isn’t as profitable, and it’s easier for a
would-be thief to buy one in the first place.¶ But there’s one explanation The Economist dismissed that strikes me as hugely important: the
abolition of lead gasoline. Kevin
Drum at Mother Jones wrote what’s universally acknowledged to be the
definitive argument for the lead/crime link, and it’s incredibly compelling. We know for a fact that lead
exposure damages people’s brains and can potentially be fatal; that’s why an international campaign to
ban leaded gasoline started around 1970. Today, leaded gasoline is almost unheard of — it’s banned in 175
countries, and there’s been a decline in lead blood levels by about 90 percent.¶ Drum marshals a wealth of evidence that the
parts of the brain damaged by lead are the same ones that check people’s aggressive impulses. Moreover,
the timing matches up: crime shot up in the mid-to-late-20th century as cars spread around the world, and started to decline in the 70s as the
anti-lead campaign was succeeding. Here’s close the relationship is, using data from the United States:¶ Lead_Crime_325¶ Now, non-homicide
violent crime appears to have ticked up in 2012, based on U.S. government surveys of victims of crime, but it’s
very possible that’s
just a blip: the official Department of Justice report says up-front that “the apparent increase in the rate of violent crimes reported to police
from 2011 to 2012 was not statistically significant.Ӧ So we have no reason to believe crime is making a come back, and every reason to believe
the historical decline in criminal violence is here to stay.¶
5. There’s less racism, sexism, and other forms of
discrimination in the world.¶ Nelson Mandela¶ CREDIT: THEANA CALITZ/AP IMAGES¶ Racism, sexism, anti-Semitism,
homophobia, and other forms of discrimination remain, without a doubt, extraordinarily powerful
forces. The statistical and experimental evidence is overwhelming — this irrefutable proof of widespread discrimination against AfricanAmericans, for instance, should put the “racism is dead” fantasy to bed.¶ Yet the need to combat discrimination denial shouldn’t blind us to
the good news. Over the centuries, humanity
has made extraordinary progress in taming its hate for and illtreatment of other humans on the basis of difference alone. Indeed, it is very likely that we live in the
least discriminatory era in the history of modern civilization. It’s not a huge prize given how bad the past
had been, but there are still gains worth celebrating.¶ Go back 150 years in time and the point should be
obvious. Take four prominent groups in 1860: African-Americans were in chains, European Jews were routinely
massacred in the ghettos and shtetls they were confined to, women around the world were denied the opportunity to work outside the home
and made almost entirely subordinate to their husbands, and LGBT people were invisible. The improvements in each of these group’s statuses
today, both in the United States and internationally, are incontestable. ¶ On closer look, we
have reason to believe the happy
trends are likely to continue. Take racial discrimination. In 2000, Harvard sociologist Lawrence Bobo
penned a comprehensive assessment of the data on racial attitudes in the United States. He found a
“national consensus” on the ideals of racial equality and integration. “A nation once comfortable as a
deliberately segregationist and racially discriminatory society has not only abandoned that view,” Bobo
writes, “but now overtly positively endorses the goals of racial integration and equal treatment. There is
no sign whatsoever of retreat from this ideal, despite events that many thought would call it into
question. The magnitude, steadiness, and breadth of this change should be lost on no one.Ӧ The norm
against overt racism has gone global. In her book on the international anti-apartheid movement in the 1980s, Syracuse’s Audie
Klotz says flatly that “the illegitimacy of white minority rule led to South Africa’s persistent diplomatic, cultural, and economic isolation.” The
belief that racial discrimination could not be tolerated had become so widespread, Klotz argues, that it united the globe — including
governments that had strategic interests in supporting South Africa’s whites — in opposition to apartheid. In 2011, 91 percent of respondents
in a sample of 21 diverse countries said that equal treatment of people of different races or ethnicities was important to them.¶ Racism
obviously survived both American and South African apartheid, albeit in more subtle, insidious forms.
“The death of Jim Crow racism has left us in an uncomfortable place,” Bobo writes, “a state of laissez-faire racism” where racial discrimination
and disparities still exist, but support for the kind of aggressive government policies needed to address them is racially polarized. But
there’s reason to hope that’ll change as well: two massive studies of the political views of younger
Americans by my TP Ideas colleagues, John Halpin and Ruy Teixeira, found that millenials were
significantly more racially tolerant and supportive of government action to address racial disparities
than the generations that preceded them. Though I’m not aware of any similar research of on a global scale, it’s hard not to
imagine they’d find similar results, suggesting that we should have hope that the power of racial prejudice may be waning.¶ The story
about gender discrimination is very similar: after the feminist movement’s enormous victories in the
20th century, structural sexism still shapes the world in profound ways, but the cause of gender equality
is making progress. In 2011, 86 percent of people in a diverse 21 country sample said that equal
treatment on the basis of gender was an important value. The U.N.’s Human Development Report’s
Gender Inequality Index — a comprehensive study of reproductive health, social empowerment, and
labor market equity — saw a 20 percent decline in observable gender inequalities from 1995 to 2011.
IMF data show consistent global declines in wage disparities between genders, labor force participation, and
educational attainment around the world. While enormous inequality remains, 2013 is looking to be the worst year for sexism in history.¶
Finally, we’ve made astonishing progress on sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination —
largely in the past 15 years. At the beginning of 2003, zero Americans lived in marriage equality states;
by the end of 2013, 38 percent of Americans will. Article 13 of the European Community Treaty bans discrimination on the
grounds of sexual orientation, and, in 2011, the UN Human Rights Council passed a resolution committing the council to documenting and
exposing discrimination on orientation or identity grounds around the world. The public
opinion trends are positive
worldwide: all of the major shifts from 2007 to 2013 in Pew’s “acceptance of homosexuality” poll were
towards greater tolerance, and young people everywhere are more open to equality for LGBT individuals than their older peers.¶
best_year_graphics-04¶ Once again, these victories are partial and by no means inevitable. Racism, sexism,
homophobia, and other forms of discrimination aren’t just “going away” on their own. They’re losing
their hold on us because people are working to change other people’s minds and because governments
are passing laws aimed at promoting equality. Positive trends don’t mean the problems are close to
solved, and certainly aren’t excuses for sitting on our hands.¶ That’s true of everything on this list. The fact that fewer people are dying from
war and disease doesn’t lessen the moral imperative to do something about those that are; the fact that people are getting richer and safer in
their homes isn’t an excuse for doing more to address poverty and crime.¶ But too often, the worst parts about the world are treated as
inevitable, the prospect of radical victory over pain and suffering dismissed as utopian fantasy. The overwhelming force of the evidence shows
that to be false. As best we can tell, the reason humanity is getting better is because humans have decided to make the world a better place.
We consciously chose to develop lifesaving medicine and build freer political systems; we’ve passed laws against workplace discrimination and
poisoning children’s minds with lead.¶ So far, these choices have more than paid off. It’s up to us to make sure they continue to.
Using the state strategically is critical to fighting racism and solves the link to their
ethics impact.
Smith, Associate Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at UC Riverside, 12
(Andrea, “The Moral Limits of the Law: Settler Colonialism and the Anti-Violence Movement,” settler
colonial studies 2, 2 (2012) Special Issue: Karangatia: Calling Out Gender and Sexuality in Settler
Societies, http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/2201473X.2012.10648842)
Given the logics of settler colonialism, it may seem to be a hopeless contradiction to work within the
US legal system at all. In fact, many social justice advocates eschew engaging in legal reform for this
reason. Consequently, we are often presented with two dichotomous choices: short-term legal reform
that addresses immediate needs but further invests us in the current colonial system or long-term
anti-colonial organising that attempts to avoid the political contradictions of short-term strategies
but does not necessarily focus on immediate needs. This essay will explore possibilities for rethinking
this dichotomous approach by rethinking the role of legal reform in general. The essay foregrounds
alternative approaches using a Native feminist analytic towards engaging legal reform that may
have a greater potential to undo the logics of settler colonialism from within. As I have argued
elsewhere, Native feminism as well as Native studies is not limited in its object of analysis.5 Rather, in its
interest in addressing the intersecting logics of heteropatriarchy and settler colonialism, it is free to
engage with diverse materials. In looking then towards alternative strategies for undoing settler
colonialism through the law, I contend that it is important to engage important work that might not seem
to be directly about Native peoples or settler colonialism if this work helps provide new resources for how
we could strategically engage the law. Consequently, I engage the work of legal scholars and activists that
address very different areas of law as a means to challenge some of the current assumptions that
undergird both reformist and revolutionary approaches to the law. DECOLONIAL REALISM Critical
race theorist Derrick Bell challenged the presupposition of much racial justice legal reform
strategies when he argued that racism is a permanent feature of society. While his work is generally
cited as a critical race theoretical approach, I would contend that his work implicitly suggests a settler
colonial framework for understanding legal reform. That is, many of the heirs of Derrick Bell do not
follow the logical consequences of his work and argue for an approach to race and the law that
seeks racial representation in the law.6 However, Bell’s analysis points to the inherent
contradictions to such an approach. Rather than seeking representation, Bell calls on Black peoples
to ‘acknowledge the permanence of our subordinate status’.7 Espousing the framework of ‘racial
realism’, Bell disavows any possibility of ‘transcendent change’.8 To the contrary, he argues that ‘[i]t
is time we concede that a commitment to racial equality merely perpetuates our disempowerment’.9
The alternative he advocates is resistance for its own sake – living ‘to harass white folks’ – or shortterm pragmatic strategies that focus less on eliminating racism and more on simply ensuring that
we do not ‘worsen conditions for those we are trying to help’.10 While Bell does not elaborate on
what those strategies may be, he points to a different kind of reasoning that could be utilised for legal
reform. In his famous story, ‘Space Traders’, aliens come to planet Earth promising to solve the
world’s problems if world leaders will simply give up Black people to the aliens. This story
narratively illustrates how thin white liberal commitments to social justice are. First, the white people of
course do give up Black people to the aliens without much thought. But what more dramatically
illustrates this point is that the reader knows that, almost without a doubt, if this were to happen in real
life, of course Black people would be given up. Within this story, however, is a little-commented scene
that speaks to perhaps a different way to approach legal reform within the context of white
supremacy. Gleason Golightly, a conservative black economics professor who serves as an informal
cabinet member for the President, becomes embroiled in a fight with the civil rights legal
establishment about the best means to oppose the proposed trade. Golightly had previously pleaded
with the President and his cabinet to reject it. When his pleas are not heard, he begins to reflect on
how his support for conservative racial policies in the interests of attaining greater political power
had been to no avail. He realises the strategy behind his appeal to the President was doomed to fail. In
retrospect, though [his] arguments were based on morality […] [i]nstead of outsmarting them,
Golightly had done what he so frequently criticised civil rights spokespersons for doing: he had
tried to get whites to do right by black people because it was right that they do so. ‘Crazy!’ he
commented when civil rights people did it. ‘Crazy!’ he mumbled to himself, at himself.11 Realising the
error of his ways, Golightly interrupts this civil rights meeting in which activists plan to organise a
moral crusade to convince white Americans to reject the space traders proposal. Instead, he
suggests that they should tell white people that they cannot wait to go on the ship because they have
learned they are being transported to a land of milk and honey. White people, argues Golightly, so
oppose policies that benefit Black people, even if they benefit white people, that they will start
litigating to stop the space traders’ proposed plan.12 The civil rights establishment rejects this
strategy as a moral outrage and begins a racial justice campaign, ultimately to no avail. What this
story troubles is social justice movements’ investment in the morality of the law. Despite the US
legal system’s complicity in settler colonialism, patriarchy, capitalism and white supremacy since
its inception, they advocate strategies for change that rest on the presupposition that the law can
somehow be made to support the end of sexism, racism and classism. Historically, as more radical
racial and social justice organisations were either crushed or co-opted by the US governments
during the 1970s, these movements shifted from a focus on a radical restructuring of the political
and economic system to a focus on articulating identity based claims that did not necessarily
challenge the prevailing power structure.13 If groups were not going to directly challenge the state,
they could then call on the state to recognise their claims to equality and redress from harms
perpetrated by other social actors. Ironically, then, the same US government that codified slavery,
segregation, anti-immigrant racism, and the genocide of indigenous peoples, now becomes the body
that will protect people of colour from racism. The fact that the US itself could not exist without the
past and continuing genocide of indigenous peoples in particular does not strike liberal legal reformists as
a contradiction. Bell suggests that it may be possible to engage in legal reform in the midst of these
contradictions if one foregoes the fantasy that the law is morally benevolent or even neutral. In
doing so, more possibilities for strategic engagement emerge. For instance, in the ‘Racial Preference
Licensing Act’, Bell suggests that rather than criminalise racial discrimination, the government
should allow discrimination, but tax it. Taxes accrued from this discrimination would then go into
an ‘equality’ fund that would support the educational and economic interests of AfricanAmericans.14 As I have argued elsewhere, the law enforcement approach has been similarly limited in
addressing the issues of gender violence when the majority of men do, or express willingness to engage
in, it.15 As a result, criminalisation has not actually led to a decrease in violence against women.16 Antiviolence activists and scholars have widely critiqued the supposed efficacy of criminalisation.17 As I will
discuss later in this essay, Native women in particular have struggled with the contradictions of engaging
the legal system to address the legacies of colonial gender violence. While there is growing critique
around criminalisation as the primary strategy for addressing gender violence, there has not been
attention to what other frameworks could be utilised for addressing gender violence. In particular, what
would happen if we pursued legal strategies based on their strategic effects rather than based on
the moral statements they propose to make?
EXTN – Uniqueness – Natives
World is getting better – 2013 was the best year on the planet – every metric goes
[insert side], people are living longer, less people are experiencing war, the world is
richer, and discrimination on the basis of race is decreasing – studies demonstrate
attitudes are changing – that’s Beauchamp. Prefer it – our ev takes into account
their args – their ev cites snapshots, our cites trends and has recency.
Status quo solves land rights.
Eugene J. Koprowski, World Net Daily, 12/26/2010, "Obama to give Manhattan back to Native
Americans?," http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=243153
President Obama is voicing support for a U.N. resolution that could accomplish something as
radical as relinquishing some U.S. sovereignty and opening a path for the return of ancient tribal
lands to American Indians, including even parts of Manhattan. The issue is causing alarm among
legal experts. In recent remarks at the White House during a "tribal nations conference," Obama
endorsed the "United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People," which includes a
sweeping declaration that "indigenous peoples have a right to lands and resources they
traditionally occupied or otherwise used" but that later were acquired by occupying forces. "U.N.
resolutions like this claiming amorphous rights can be a stalking horse for future attempts to have
international courts enforce broad interpretations of those rights at the expense of American
sovereignty," Theodore Frank, a fellow with the Center for Legal Policy at the Manhattan Institute, a
leading public policy think tank in New York City, told WND. Academic legal experts indicate that
American Indians during the Carter era first drew up plans for reacquisition of lost tribal lands,
setting the stage for the U.N. resolution that Obama is embracing. The feasibility study, eyeing 650
million acres of federally owned land in the U.S., was conducted by the Indian Education Institute at
Eastern Oregon State, one expert recalled for WND.
No terminal uniqueness – living conditions are improving.
Adamson, First Peoples Worldwide founder and president, 2009
[Rebecca, “Challenges to Native American Advancement: The Recession and Native America”
https://www.google.com/search?q=native+american+poverty%2C+decreasing&aq=f&oq=native+americ
an+poverty%2C+decreasing&aqs=chrome.0.57.4413&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF8#hl=en&safe=off&sclient=psy-ab&q=%22native+american+lives+are+improving%22+twentyfirst+century&oq=%22native+american+lives+are+improving%22+twentyfirst+century&gs_l=serp.3...84617.103587.0.103881.53.43.9.0.0.0.238.4248.26j14j3.43.0...5.0...1c.1.7.ps
y-ab.yhXfw9o1HOE&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_cp.r_qf.&fp=ee43abfe2c3d4bbc&biw=1304&bih=683, p.5]
These are exciting times to be a Native American.¶ The century-old movement for Indian¶ SelfDetermination is now bearing fruit as¶ Native Americans have increased control over their¶ assets and
can apply Indigenous principles to shape¶ their economies. Yet, as this report powerfully¶ documents,
glaring disparities persist and much¶ work remains to further increase Indian control of¶ their rich assets,
and thereby increase their wellbeing¶ and prosperity.¶ Indigenous Peoples conceive of the term “assets”¶
differently from those in the dominant culture. In¶ addition to the obvious assets of land and money,¶
Indians count non-tangible assets such as culture,¶ language, spirituality and kinship networks as
important¶ sources of their wealth. “Development,”¶ understood by the dominant culture as an increase¶
in material wealth, is seen by Native Americans to be¶ a more complex balancing of the array of assets.
In¶ order for development to occur, all assets must be¶ simultaneously enhanced. Thus, extractive
projects,¶ which remove and sell resources at the expense of¶ language and culture, do not generally
create the¶ lasting wealth they promise, but more often they¶ lead to the loss of culture, resulting in
social breakdown¶ and persistent material poverty.¶ This report highlights some of the factors that¶ have
led to the disparities we now widely observe¶ between Native Americans and their non-Native¶
neighbors: the appropriation of Indian lands for the¶ gain of white settlers; the mismanagement by the¶
Bureau of Indian Affairs of resources found on¶ Native lands; and the underinvestment by the¶ federal
government in Native American education,¶ health care and small-business development.¶ Despite
enduring these impediments for half a¶ millennium, Native Americans are still here, and¶ many
communities are experiencing renewed life. In¶ most cases, these success stories share a common¶
characteristic: greater self-determination in the form¶ of control of their assets.¶ Native Peoples are
amazingly adaptable and¶ these days Native Americans, Alaska Natives and¶ Pacific Islanders are
responding to the challenges of¶ unhealthy food systems with businesses aimed at¶ Native food
production, and to the climate crisis¶ with projects that harness the power of the sun and¶ wind to
produce electricity.
Native American lives are improving in spite of inequality – employment is up,
income and population are rising.
Muhammad, Institute for Policy Studies program on inequality and the common
good senior organizer and research associate, 2009
[Dedrick, “Challenges to Native American Advancement: The Recession and Native America”
https://www.google.com/search?q=native+american+poverty%2C+decreasing&aq=f&oq=native+america
n+poverty%2C+decreasing&aqs=chrome.0.57.4413&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF8#hl=en&safe=off&sclient=psy-ab&q=%22native+american+lives+are+improving%22+twentyfirst+century&oq=%22native+american+lives+are+improving%22+twentyfirst+century&gs_l=serp.3...84617.103587.0.103881.53.43.9.0.0.0.238.4248.26j14j3.43.0...5.0...1c.1.7.ps
y-ab.yhXfw9o1HOE&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_cp.r_qf.&fp=ee43abfe2c3d4bbc&biw=1304&bih=683, p.6]
Despite recent strides, inequality persists. Over the last decade, Native American unemployment rates¶
have decreased and income levels have risen. Despite these important gains, Native American income¶
levels are still only two-thirds that of non-Hispanic white Americans. Likewise, the Native American¶
unemployment rate remains double the unemployment rate for the U.S. as a whole.¶ Native populations
are on the rise. The Native American population increased fivefold between 1960¶ and 2000, from about
500,000 to nearly 2.5 million. Between 1990 and 2000, the Native American population increased by 25
percent on reservations and by 21 percent off-reservation. Over that same time period, overall U.S.
population increase was 15.6 percent.
Poverty declining now.
Muhammad, Institute for Policy Studies program on inequality and the common
good senior organizer and research associate, 2009
[Dedrick, “Challenges to Native American Advancement: The Recession and Native America”
https://www.google.com/search?q=native+american+poverty%2C+decreasing&aq=f&oq=native+america
n+poverty%2C+decreasing&aqs=chrome.0.57.4413&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF8#hl=en&safe=off&sclient=psy-ab&q=%22native+american+lives+are+improving%22+twentyfirst+century&oq=%22native+american+lives+are+improving%22+twentyfirst+century&gs_l=serp.3...84617.103587.0.103881.53.43.9.0.0.0.238.4248.26j14j3.43.0...5.0...1c.1.7.ps
y-ab.yhXfw9o1HOE&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_cp.r_qf.&fp=ee43abfe2c3d4bbc&biw=1304&bih=683,
p.18]
There was a notable improvement in poverty¶ rates for American Indians and Alaska Natives living¶ on
reservations and trust lands between 1990 and¶ 2000. The percentage of people in this category¶ living in
poverty was nearly cut in half, from 47.3¶ percent to 28.4 percent. During this time period,¶ the poverty
rate actually increased from 10.0 percent¶ to 12.4 percent for the rest of the country. However,¶ despite the
progress made by Native Americans¶ living on reservations, their poverty rate was still¶ more than twice
the national average.
EXTN – Links – Natives
Corporations fill in – that’s uniquely worse
Mary Christina Wood, Oregon Law Professor, 1994
(“Protecting the Attributes of Native Sovereignty” Utah Law Review, p. L/N)
A barrage of recent
development proposals directed to tribes starkly demonstrates an intense modern
pressure to develop and industrialize Indian Country. 58 In the era of Self-Determination, however, land grabbing is
likely to take subtle forms. The territorial boundaries of Indian Country are unlikely to diminish significantly in the present era. Indian land
can be transferred only to the federal government, and rarely is Indian land directly taken out of Indian hands. 59 Instead, the
modern
rush for Indian land will likely take the form of leasing and development. 60 Most Indian tribes have
established tribal corporations and are poised to enter the capitalist economy; indeed, many tribes have already established themselves as
economic partners with non-Indian industrial interests. 61 Tribal
councils across the country are entertaining offers
by private non-Indian corporations to lease tribal lands for mines, industrial sites, waste dumps,
residential and commercial developments, and incinerators. 62 Waste disposal issues provide a revealing glimpse
of the intense market pressures on tribes, through their tribal councils, to accommodate non-Indian activity on their land. Due to the
scarcity of waste disposal facilities, 63 the reluctance of most non-Indian communities to host new facilities, 64 and the prospect of relaxed
regulation in Indian Country, 65 waste disposal interests have aggressively targeted Indian lands as sites for the nation's next generation of
waste facilities. Nearly every Indian tribe has been asked by industry or government, or both, to accept waste produced by the non-Indian
sector. 66 Proposals range from hazardous waste disposal facilities, 67 to regional solid waste landfills, 68 to PCB waste dumps, 69 to
agricultural, hazardous, and medical waste incinerators. 70 Several tribal councils have pursued a U.S. Department of Energy ("DOE") offer
to store thousands of irradiated spent fuel rods from the nation's 111 commercial nuclear reactors on their reservations. 71 The 70,000
metric tons of waste from the fuel rods [*1486] will remain radioactive for more than 10,000 years. 72 The rush to develop Indian land
and resources has ignited fierce opposition within Indian Country. Many native people oppose the use of their land for non-Indian
residential and commercial development, 73 mining, 74 waste disposal, 75 and gaming. 76 The deep-seated internal conflict over
development of Indian lands has received scant attention in policy-making circles. Instead, there
is a prevailing assumption
that such development, because it requires the approval of tribal councils, is consistent with tribal
interests. 78 Colonialism, recognized as an overriding feature of past federal Indian policy, 79 is a more elusive force in the modern SelfDetermination era, 80 yet it manifests itself in the intense pressure to exploit native land and resources. 81 [*1489] As in every past era,
the federal government's current role remains important. Because the federal government still
holds trust title to Indian lands and purports to act as a fiduciary in managing Indian lands, the
legal obligations of the government are integral to carrying out those management functions.
Moreover, in light of the unmistakable modern rush for Indian land and resources, the federal lease approval function must be measured
against trust duties to reflect the new consensual dynamics and deference to tribes ushered in by the Self-Determination era.
They have implementation problems – all of their evidence speaks to red pedagogy
in theory and not in practice – collective action is better than critical theory.
Pace, University of San Francisco education associate professor, and Hemmings,
University of Cincinnati educational studies professor, 2007
[Judith and Annette, Review of Educational Research, Vol. 77, No. 1, March 2007, “Understanding
Authority in Classrooms: A Review of Theory, Ideology, and Research” Jstor]
Sandy Grande (2004), a Quechua scholar who has infused critical theory and¶ pedagogical practices into a "Red pedagogy" for indigenous Native
American students,¶ agrees that educators must move beyond simple cultural constructions and ¶ analyses. Teachers who seek to empower Native
Americans need to engage students¶ in "self-conscious traditionalism" that imports the language and visions of¶ ancestors to the concerns of the
present (p. 169). Grande
implies that such traditions¶ should be absorbed into the ways in which teachers
exercise their authority.¶ Peter Murrell (2001) made a similar case for teachers working in urban schools¶ serving Black students and
other marginalized groups. Effective educators in his¶ view are "community teachers" who possess contextualized knowledge about their ¶
students' cultures, communities, and identities and draw on this knowledge to create¶ teaching practices that are effective in diverse classroom
settings (p. 52).¶ Although these
scholars recognize the importance of context and the instructional¶ value of tapping into local knowledge,
not go far enough to explain¶ and address the enormous difficulties many teachers have with
establishing legitimacy¶ and culturally responsive practice in classrooms serving ethnic minority students.¶
Educational anthropologists for decades have documented these difficulties,¶ especially in classrooms in
which misunderstandings or conflicts abound over¶ what constitutes appropriate behavior( Ballenger,1 992;
D'Amato, 1993; Erickson,¶ 1987; Heath, 1983; McDermott, 1977; Philips, 1982; Vogt, Jordan, & Tharp,¶ 1993). These studies bear
critical implications for the importance and difficulty in¶ enacting shared conceptions of moral authority.
they do
Using the state is necessary to solve colonialism – shouldn’t leave the tools of the
colonizer out of the hands of the colonized.
Grande, Connecticut College education associate professor, 2007
[Sandy, Critical Pedagogy: Where are we now? By Peter McLaren, “Red Lake Woebegone: Pedagogy,
Decolonization, and the Critical Project”
http://books.google.com/books?id=M97YKJdkJbcC&q=sandy+grande#v=onepage&q=grammar%20of%
20empire&f=false, p.330]
Audre Lorde’s essay, The Master’s Tools Will Not Dismantle the Master’s House, is one of the most
quoted essays in academic history and, I would also venture to say, one that needs rethinking. While it is
self-evident that indigenous knowledge is essential to the process of decolonization, I would also argue
that the Master’s tools are necessary. Otherwise, to take Audre Lorde seriously means to create a
dichotomy between the tools of the colonizer and those of the colonized. Such a dichotomy leaves the
indigenous scholar to grapple with a kind of “Sophie’s Choice” moment where one feels compelled to
choose between retaining their integrity (identity) as a Native scholar by employing only indigenous
knowledge or to “sell out” and employ the frames of Western knowledge. What does it mean for
indigenous scholars to engage Western knowledge? Does it signify a final submission to the siren’s song,
seducing us into the colonialist abyss with promises of empowerment? Or is it the necessary first step in
reclaiming and decolonizing an intellectual space – an inquiry room – of our own? Such questions
provoke beyond the bounds of academic exercise, suggesting instead the need for an academic exorcism.¶
The demon to be purged is the specter of colonialism. As indigenous scholars, we live within, against, and
outside of its constant company, witnessing its various manifestations as it shape-shifts its way into
everything from research and public policy to textbooks and classrooms. Thus, the colonial tax of Native
scholars not only requires a renegotiation of personal identity but also an analysis of how whole nations
get trans- or (dis)figured when articulated through Western frames of knowing. As Edward Said observes,
“institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines, even colonial bureaucracies and colonial
styles” all support to the “Western discourse” (Said, 1985, p.2). In other words, is it possible to engage
the grammar of empire without replicating its effects?
State action can benefit Native peoples – Natives can effectuate reformism in a nonpaternalistic way.
Casey, Cornell University JD Candidate, 1994
[James, Cornell Law review, Vol 79, “Sovereignty by sufferance: the illusion of Indian tribal
sovereignty” https://128.253.118.208/research/cornell-law-review/upload/Casey-note.pdf, p.433-6]
There have been many proposals to solve the sovereignty¶ problems outlined above. Some examples
include a constitutional¶ amendment guaranteeing the sovereign status of Indian tribes,8 9 legislative¶
enactments to undo the injustices of the past and provide for¶ increased representation in the
government,190 and increased dependence¶ on and control of the government "trust" relationship.' 91 All
of¶ these approaches suffer, however, from the same basic flaw: they¶ ground themselves in the current
system of federal Indian law.192 As¶ the above discussion indicates, the current system does not
adequately¶ protect the rights of Indian tribes because it is not based upon their¶ consent and it provides no
defined method for dealing with the conflicts¶ that threaten tribal sovereignty. Without addressing these
two¶ fundamental problems, approaches that merely doctor the injustices¶ wrought by the system relieve
the symptoms but fail to treat the¶ disease.¶ Before discussing an approach that would address these¶
problems, however, a very basic question must be answered. What incentive¶ does the United States have
to enter into a new arrangement¶ with the Indian tribes? 93 The tempting answer is that, beyond the¶ moral
rightness of treating indigenous peoples with dignity, fairness¶ and respect, there are none. Yet, the United
States has at least two¶ possible incentives, the first being international in nature and the second¶
domestic.¶ In the international arena, the rights of indigenous peoples appear¶ to be receiving greater
attention than ever before. The development¶ of international human rights law has created a climate¶
favorable to action in the area of indigenous rights.194 "It increasingly¶ is difficult for governments
concerned about their human rights image¶ to ignore blatantly the problems of their indigenous peoples....¶
[T] he 1980s marked the beginning of an unprecedented period of international¶ activity on the question of
indigenous rights."195 Among¶ these rights is the right of self-determination. 196 As this right gains¶
greater stature in the international forum, it will be more difficult for¶ the United States to ignore its own
violations of the principle of selfstructural¶ determination. The United. States has a definite stake in
maintaining¶ its image as a supporter of international law.197¶ Arguably, the United States is already in
violation of international¶ law under the U.N. Charter. Article 73 provides in part:¶ Members of the United
Nations which have or assume responsibilities¶ for the administration of territories whose peoples have
not¶ yet attained a full measure of self-government recognize the principle¶ that the interests of the
inhabitants of these territories are paramount,¶ and accept as a sacred trust the obligation to promote to the¶
utmost, within the system of international peace and security established¶ by the present Charter, the wellbeing of the inhabitants of¶ these territories, and, to this end:¶ a. to ensure, with due respect for the culture,
of the peoples¶ concerned, their political, economic, social, and educational¶ advancement, their just
treatment, and their protection against¶ abuses;¶ b. to develop self-government, to take due account of the¶
political aspirations of the peoples, and to assist them in the¶ progressive development of their free
political institutions, according¶ to the particular circumstances of each territory and its¶ peoples and their
varying stages of advancement ....19 8¶ The United States maintains a "trust" relationship with the tribes,
yet¶ it has not fulfilled the requirements set out above. Whether the concern¶ is international image,
violation of international law, or both, the¶ United States clearly has an incentive under international law
to enter¶ into an agreement that satisfies the self-determination rights of the¶ Indian tribes, thereby bringing
the United States into compliance with¶ the modern trend of protecting indigenous rights.' 99¶ The United
States government also has an incentive on the domestic¶ front for the development of such an agreement.
The current¶ tribal-federal relationship is a source of great tension between the¶ tribes and the people of the
United States. In addition, the paternalistic¶ approach that the government takes toward the tribes requires¶
large amounts of federal money to implement. A mutually developed¶ relationship between the tribes and
the United States government¶ would address both of these concerns to a significant degree. By creating¶
enforceable expectations for the federal government, the individual¶ states, and the tribes, a mutually
developed relationship¶ reduces conflict because all parties have some understanding of their¶ standing on
particular issues. Also, a mutually developed relationship¶ allows for greater economic development of the
tribes, with the ultimate¶ goal being economic self-sufficiency. 200 The United States government¶ could
only benefit from such a state of affairs. Because the¶ needs of both sides could be adequately addressed, a
more harmonious¶ and efficient relationship could be developed to the mutual benefit¶ of the tribes and the
United States. Thus, the United States has¶ both international and domestic incentives to develop a
mutually defined¶ and established relationship between the individual Indian¶ tribes and itself.¶ The
remainder of this section discusses a model for tribal-federal¶ relations that respects the sovereignty and
interests of all concerned¶ parties. Its basic structure is that of a "free association" patterned, in¶ part, after
the compact of free association between the United States¶ and the governments of the Marshall Islands
and the Federated States¶ of Micronesia.201 The value of building a system with this structure is¶ threefold. First, a free association agreement will comprehensively¶ define the relationship between the two
sovereigns, as well as establish¶ methods for dealing with possible disputes. Second, the structure of¶ this
relationship comes from international law, and so, brings with it¶ many aspects of a system that already
addresses sovereignty concerns¶ similar to those plaguing the tribal-federal relationship. Finally, the¶
Micronesia Agreement came out of the trustee relationship that originally¶ existed between the two
parties. The progression from trust to¶ free association is analogous to the instant situation.
The state is necessary in the process of decolonization.
Smith, Associate Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at UC Riverside, 12
(Andrea, “The Moral Limits of the Law: Settler Colonialism and the Anti-Violence Movement,” settler
colonial studies 2, 2 (2012) Special Issue: Karangatia: Calling Out Gender and Sexuality in Settler
Societies, http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/2201473X.2012.10648842)
These models have greater potential for dealing with crime¶ effectively because, if we want people who
perpetuate violence to live¶ in society peaceably, it makes sense to develop justice models in¶ which the
community is involved in holding him/her accountable.¶ Under the current incarceration model, perpetrators are taken away¶
from their community and are further hindered from developing¶ ethical relationships within a community context. ¶¶¶¶ However, the
problem with these models is that they work only¶ when the community unites in holding perpetrators
accountable. In¶ cases of sexual and domestic violence, the community often sides¶ with the perpetrator
rather than the victim. As Deer argues, in many¶ Native communities, these models are often pushed on domestic¶
violence survivors in order to pressure them to reconcile with their¶ families and ‘restore’ the community
without sufficient concern for¶ their personal safety.26 In addition, Native advocates have sometime¶ critiqued the uncritical
use of ‘traditional’ forms of governance for¶ addressing domestic violence. They argue that Native communities¶ have been pressured to adopt
circle sentencing because it is¶ supposed to be an indigenous traditional practice. However, some¶ advocates contend that there is no such
traditional practice in their¶ communities. Moreover, they are concerned that the process of¶ diverting cases outside the court system can be
dangerous for¶ survivors. In one example, Bishop Hubert O’Connor (a white man)¶ was found guilty of multiple cases of sexual abuse but his¶
punishment under the restorative justice model was to participate in ¶ a healing circle with his victims. Because his crimes were against ¶
Aboriginal women, he was able to opt for an ‘Aboriginal approach’ –¶ an approach, many argue, that did little to provide real healing for¶ the
survivors and accountability for the perpetrator. ¶¶¶¶ Deer complains that there
is a tendency to romanticise and¶ homogenise
‘traditional’ alternatives to incarceration. First, she¶ notes traditional approaches might, in fact, be harsher than¶
incarceration. Many Native people presume that traditional modes of¶ justice focus on conflict resolution. In fact, Deer argues, penalties
for¶ societal infractions were not lenient – they entailed banishment,¶ shaming, reparations, physical
punishment and sometimes death.¶ Deer notes that revising tribal codes by reincorporating traditional¶
practices is not a simple process. It is sometimes difficult to¶ determine what these practices were or how
they could be made¶ useful today. For example, some practices, such as banishment,¶ would not have the same impact today. Prior to
colonisation, Native¶ communities were so close-knit and interdependent that banishment¶ was often the equivalent of a death sentence. Today,
however,¶ banished perpetrators could simply leave home and join the¶ dominant society. ¶¶¶¶ While
tribes now have the
opportunity to divest from the US¶ colonial system, many Native women remain under violent attack.¶
They may need to use the federal system until such time that more¶ advanced decolonisation becomes
possible. Thus Deer advocates a¶ two-fold strategy: 1) The short-term strategy of holding the federal¶
government accountable for prosecuting rape cases; and 2)¶ encouraging tribes to hold perpetrators
accountable directly so that¶ they will eventually not need to rely on federal interference. This¶ approach can be
misread as a simple formula for reform. However, it¶ is important to remember that the project of prison abolition is a¶ positive
rather than a negative project. The goal is not to tell¶ survivors that they can never call the police or
engage the criminal¶ justice system. The question is not, should a survivor call the police?¶ The question is:
why have we given survivors no other option but to¶ call the police? Deer is suggesting that it is not
inconsistent to reform ¶ federal justice systems while at the same time building tribal¶ infrastructures
for accountability that will eventually replace the ¶ federal system. ¶¶¶¶ If we focus simply on community
accountability without a¶ larger critique of the state, we often fall back on framing community¶
accountability as simply an add-on to the criminal justice system.¶ Because anti-violence work has focused simply on
advocacy, we have¶ not developed strategies for ‘due process’, leaving that to the state. ¶ When our political imaginaries are captured by the state,
we can then¶ presume that the state should be left to administer ‘justice’ while¶ communities will serve simply as a supplement to this regime. To
do¶ so, however, recapitulates the fundamental injustice of a settler state¶ that is founded on slavery, genocide and the exploitation of¶ immigrant
labour. Further, we are unable to imagine new visions for¶ liberatory nationhood that are not structured on hierarchical logics, ¶ violence and
domination. ¶¶¶¶ We face a dilemma: on the one hand, the incarceration ¶ approach for addressing sexual/domestic violence promotes the¶
repression of communities of colour without really providing safety¶ for survivors. On the other hand, restorative justice models often ¶ promote
community silence and denial under the rhetoric of¶ community restoration without concern for the safety of survivors.¶ Thus, our challenge is to
develop community-based models that¶ respond to gender violence in ways that hold perpetrators¶ accountable. Unfortunately, in
this
discussion advocates often¶ assume only two possibilities: the criminal justice system or¶ restorative
justice. When anyone finds faults with the restorative¶ justice model, it is assumed that the traditional
criminal justice¶ approach must be the back-up strategy. Deer’s approach, by¶ contrast, is to work with the
criminal justice system while continuing¶ to develop effective strategies for addressing violence. These
will¶ eventually eliminate the need to rely on the criminal justice system. ¶¶¶¶ Of course, the trap of pursuing reforms is
that they can create¶ investment in the current US legal system and detract from building¶ new systems of governance that are not based on
violence,¶ domination and control. At the same time, we are not going to go¶ from where we are now to revolution tomorrow. Thus, it becomes¶
important to strategise around what may be called ‘revolutionary’¶ reforms. Other abolitionists have argued that the only reforms that ¶ should be
supported are those that diminish the criminal justice¶ apparatus. Other abolitions have argued that this approach leaves¶ people vulnerable to the
‘crimes of the powerful’, such as rape and¶ domestic violence.27¶¶¶¶ It is in this context that we can understand Deer’s current ¶ projects. She has
worked on building tribal infrastructure by¶ encouraging and assisting tribes to develop tribal civil protection¶ orders. Her strategy is not so much
based on the rationale that civil¶ protection orders will in themselves provide protection for women. ¶ Rather, by developing these orders, tribes
gain the practice of¶ developing their own systems for addressing violence. Deer notes¶ that this is one area that is not likely to be interfered with
by the US¶ federal government. At the same time, it is not an approach that is¶ directly tied with investing tribes in the project of incarceration. ¶
Thus, it becomes a reform that tribal communities may adopt now as¶ they develop creative responses for addressing violence. The reason ¶ for
this suggested reform is that many tribal governments incorrectly¶ think that the federal government is already adequately addressing¶ gender
violence and do not take initiative to address it themselves.28¶¶¶¶ In the end,
the importance of Deer’s recommendation is not so¶
much an investment in that particular strategy, but the manner in¶ which it encourages us to think of short-term
strategies that are not¶ simply based on increased incarceration, strategies that will more¶ likely fall under
the federal radar screen so that tribal communities¶ have more time to practice new ways of supporting
accountability for¶ violence. This will encourage communities to develop better¶ decolonial practices in the
future. As Deer notes, a ‘long-term vision¶ for radical change requires both immediate measures to address¶
sexual violence and a forward-looking effort to dismantle the culture¶ of rape that has infiltrated tribal
nations’.29 At the same time, many¶ other Native activists are engaging community accountability¶ strategies
that do not work with the current system at all. These¶ strategies are not broadly advertised because these
activists do not¶ want to gain the attention of federal authorities. Yet, many¶ communities have developed informal
strategies for addressing¶ authorities. For instance, one man who assaulted a relative was¶ banished from his community. As he was simply able
to move to the¶ city, tribal members would follow him to various work places,¶ carrying signs that described him as a rapist. Again, this may be
a¶ strategy that we may or may not support. But the point is that it is¶ important to engage the experimental and ‘jazzy’ approaches for¶
developing community-based accountability strategies.30¶¶¶¶ In his recent book X-Marks, Scott Lyons engages with Native¶ activists and
scholars who call for decolonisation as a central focus¶ for organising.31 Those
who call for decolonisation often do not¶
effectively engage in any short-term reformist strategy, even though¶ they may save the lives of
indigenous peoples who are currently¶ under immediate attack. As a result, the immediate needs of people¶
often get sacrificed in favour of articulating seemingly politically-pure¶ ideals. Conversely, those who do engage in
short-term reform¶ strategies often decry the goal of decolonisation as ‘unrealistic’. In ¶ doing so, they do not critique the manner in which these
strategies¶ often retrench rather than challenge the colonial status quo. Lyons¶ affirms the need for decolonisation, but notes
that
decolonization¶ happens with pre-existing materials and institutions. He calls on¶ Native peoples to think
creatively about these institutions and about¶ the ways in which they can be deployed not just for shortterm gains¶ but for a long-term vision of liberation.
2nr – EXTN – Smith
No reason you should defer on reforms for the rev, that’s Smith.
1. Endorsing particular actions doesn’t mean you endorse all of the state’s
history. Endorsing state action can be STRATEGIC, not WHOLESALE.
2. No tradeoff – can endorse changes to the state as well as build an alternative
structure - proves no ethics impacts.
If AFF:
3. This also means there is no ethics DA to the perm – a state link is
INSUFFICIENT to vote neg.
***Sexism***
Frontline – Sexism
Trends point toward greater equality – progress is slow and steady.
Beauchamp, Think Progress, 12-11-13
[Zack, “5 Reasons Why 2013 Was The Best Year In Human”
http://thinkprogress.org/security/2013/12/11/3036671/2013-certainly-year-human-history/, accessed
1-20-14, TAP]
Between the brutal civil war in Syria, the government shutdown and all of the deadly dysfunction it represents, the NSA spying revelations, and
massive inequality, it’d be easy to for you to enter 2014 thinking the last year has been an awful one.¶ But you’d be wrong. We have every
reason to believe that 2013
was, in fact, the best year on the planet for humankind.¶ Contrary to what you might have
heard, virtually all of the most important forces that determine what make people’s lives good — the things
that determine how long they live, and whether they live happily and freely — are trending in an extremely happy direction.
While it’s possible that this progress could be reversed by something like runaway climate change, the effects will
have to be dramatic to overcome the extraordinary and growing progress we’ve made in making the
world a better place.¶ Here’s the five big reasons why.¶ 1. Fewer people are dying young, and more are living
longer.¶ India Polio¶ CREDIT: AP PHOTO/MAHESH KUMAR¶ The greatest story in recent human history is the simplest:
we’re winning the fight against death. “There is not a single country in the world where infant or child
mortality today is not lower than it was in 1950,” writes Angus Deaton, a Princeton economist who
works on global health issues.¶ The most up-to-date numbers on global health, the 2013 World Health Organization (WHO)
statistical compendium, confirm Deaton’s estimation. Between 1990 and 2010, the percentage of children who died before their fifth
birthday dropped by almost half. Measles deaths declined by 71 percent, and both tuberculosis and maternal deaths by half again. HIV, that
modern plague, is also being held back, with deaths from AIDS-related illnesses down by 24 percent since 2005.¶ In short, fewer people are
dying untimely deaths. And that’s
not only true in rich countries: life expectancy has gone up between 1990 and
2011 in every WHO income bracket. The gains are even more dramatic if you take the long view: global life expectancy was 47 in
the early 1950s, but had risen to 70 — a 50 percent jump — by 2011. For even more perspective, the average Briton in 1850 — when the British
Empire had reached its apex — was 40. The average person today should expect to live almost twice as long as the average citizen of the
world’s wealthiest and most powerful country in 1850.¶ In real terms, this means millions of fewer dead adults and children a year, millions
fewer people who spend their lives suffering the pains and unfreedoms imposed by illness, and millions more people spending their twilight
years with loved ones. And the trends are all positive — “progress has accelerated in recent years in many countries with the highest rates of
mortality,” as the WHO rather bloodlessly put it.¶ What’s going on? Obviously, it’s fairly complicated, but the
most important drivers
have been technological and political innovation. The Enlightenment-era advances in the scientific
method got people doing high-quality research, which brought us modern medicine and the information
technologies that allow us to spread medical breakthroughs around the world at increasingly faster
rates. Scientific discoveries also fueled the Industrial Revolution and the birth of modern capitalism,
giving us more resources to devote to large-scale application of live-saving technologies. And the global
spread of liberal democracy made governments accountable to citizens, forcing them to attend to their
health needs or pay the electoral price.¶ We’ll see the enormously beneficial impact of these two forces, technology and
democracy, repeatedly throughout this list, which should tell you something about the foundations of human progress. But when talking about
improvements in health, we shouldn’t neglect foreign aid. Nations donating huge amounts of money out of an altruistic interest in the welfare
of foreigners is historically unprecedented, and while not all aid has been helpful, health aid has been a huge boon.¶ Even Deaton, who wrote
one of 2013′s harshest assessments of foreign aid, believes “the case for assistance to fight disease such as HIV/AIDS or smallpox is strong.”
That’s because these programs have demonstrably saved lives — the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), a 2003 program
pushed by President Bush, paid for anti-retroviral treatment for over 5.1 million people in the poor countries hardest-hit by the AIDS epidemic.¶
So we’re
outracing the Four Horseman, extending our lives faster than pestilence, war, famine, and death can take them. That
alone should be enough to say the world is getting better.¶ 2. Fewer people suffer from extreme
poverty, and the world is getting happier.¶ APTOPIX India Maha Kumbh¶ CREDIT: SAURABH DAS/AP PHOTO¶ There are
fewer people in abject penury than at any other point in human history, and middle class people enjoy
their highest standard of living ever. We haven’t come close to solving poverty: a number of African countries in
particular have chronic problems generating growth, a nut foreign aid hasn’t yet cracked. So this isn’t a call for complacency about
poverty any more than acknowledging victories over disease is an argument against tackling malaria. But make no mistake: as a
whole, the world is much richer in 2013 than it was before.¶ 721 million fewer people lived in extreme
poverty ($1.25 a day) in 2010 than in 1981, according to a new World Bank study from October. That’s
astounding — a decline from 40 to about 14 percent of the world’s population suffering from abject
want. And poverty rates are declining in every national income bracket: even in low income countries, the
percentage of people living in extreme poverty ($1.25 a day in 2005 dollars) a day gone down from 63 in 1981 to 44 in 2010.¶ We can be fairly
confident that these trends are continuing. For one thing, they survived the Great Recession in 2008. For another, the decline in poverty has
been fueled by global economic growth, which looks to be continuing: global GDP grew by 2.3 percent in 2012, a number that’ll rise to 2.9
percent in 2013 according to IMF projections.¶ The bulk of the recent decline in poverty comes form India and China — about 80 percent from
China *alone*. Chinese economic and social reform, a delayed reaction to the mass slaughter and starvation of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, has
been the engine of poverty’s global decline. If you subtract China, there are actually more poor people today than there were in 1981
(population growth trumping the percentage declines in poverty).¶ But we shouldn’t discount China. If what we care about is fewer people
suffering the misery of poverty, then it shouldn’t matter what nation the less-poor people call home. Chinese growth should be celebrated, not
shunted aside.¶ The
poor haven’t been the only people benefitting from global growth. Middle class people
have access to an ever-greater stock of life-improving goods. Televisions and refrigerators, once luxury goods, are now
comparatively cheap and commonplace. That’s why large-percentage improvements in a nation’s GDP appear to correlate strongly with higher
levels of happiness among the nation’s citizens; people like having things that make their lives easier and more worry-free.¶ Global economic
growth in the past five decades has dramatically reduced poverty and made people around the world happier. Once again, we’re better off.¶
3. War is becoming rarer and less deadly.¶ APTOPIX Mideast Libya¶ CREDIT: AP PHOTO/ MANU BRABO¶ Another massive
conflict could overturn the global progress against disease and poverty. But it appears war, too, may be losing its fangs.¶ Steven Pinker’s
2011 book The Better Angels Of Our Nature is the gold standard in this debate. Pinker brought a treasure trove of
data to bear on the question of whether the world has gotten more peaceful, and found that, in the long arc of
human history, both war and other forms of violence (the death penalty, for instance) are on a
centuries-long downward slope.¶ Pinker summarizes his argument here if you don’t own the book. Most eye-popping are
the numbers for the past 50 years; Pinker finds that “the worldwide rate of death from interstate and
civil war combined has juddered downward…from almost 300 per 100,000 world population during
World War II, to almost 30 during the Korean War, to the low teens during the era of the Vietnam War,
to single digits in the 1970s and 1980s, to less than 1 in the twenty-first century.” Here’s what that looks like
graphed:¶ Pinker¶ CREDIT: STEVEN PINKER/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL¶ So it looks like the smallest percentage of humans alive
since World War II, and in all likelihood in human history, are living through the horrors of war. Did 2013 give us any reason
to believe that Pinker and the other scholars who agree with him have been proven wrong?¶ Probably not. The academic debate over the
decline of war really exploded in 2013, but the “declinist” thesis has fared pretty well. Challenges
to Pinker’s conclusion that battle
deaths have gone down over time have not withstood scrutiny. The most compelling critique, a new paper by Bear F. Braumoeller,
argues that if you control for the larger number of countries in the last 50 years, war happens at roughly the same rates as it has historically.¶
There are lots of things you might say about Braumoeller’s argument, and I’ve asked Pinker for his two cents (update: Pinker’s response here).
But most importantly, if battle deaths per 100,000 people really has declined, then his argument doesn’t mean very much. If
(percentagewise) fewer people are dying from war, then what we call “war” now is a lot less deadly than “war” used
to be. Braumoeller suggests population growth and improvements in battle medicine explain the decline, but that’s not convincing: tell me
with a straight face that the only differences in deadliness between World War II, Vietnam, and the wars you see today is that there are more
people and better doctors.¶ There’s a more rigorous way of putting that: today,
we see many more civil wars than we do
wars between nations. The former tend to be less deadly than the latter. That’s why the other major challenge to Pinker’s
thesis in 2013, the deepening of the Syrian civil war, isn’t likely to upset the overall trend. Syria’s war is an unimaginable
tragedy, one responsible for the rare, depressing increase in battle deaths from 2011 to 2012. However, the overall 2011-2012 trend
“fits well with the observed long-term decline in battle deaths,” according to researchers at the
authoritative Uppsala Conflict Data Program, because the uptick is not enough to suggest an overall
change in trend. We should expect something similar when the 2013 numbers are published.¶ Why are smaller and smaller percentages
of people being exposed to the horrors of war? There are lots of reasons one could point to, but two of the biggest ones are the spread of
democracy and humans getting, for lack of a better word, better.¶ That democracies never, or almost never, go to war with each other is not
seriously in dispute: the statistical evidence is ridiculously strong. While some argue that the “democratic peace,” as it’s called, is caused by
things other than democracy itself, there’s
good experimental evidence that democratic leaders and citizens just
don’t want to fight each other.¶ Since 1950, democracy has spread around the world like wildfire. There
were only a handful of democracies after World War II, but that grew to roughly 40 percent of all by the end of the Cold War. Today, a
comfortable majority — about 60 percent — of all states are democracies. This freer world is also a safer one.¶ Second — and this is Pinker’s
preferred explanation — people have developed strategies for dealing with war’s causes and consequences. “Human ingenuity and experience
have gradually been brought to bear,” Pinker writes, “just as they have chipped away at hunger and disease.” A series of human inventions,
things like U.N. peacekeeping operations, which nowadays are very successful at reducing violence, have given us a set of social tools
increasingly well suited to reducing the harm caused by armed conflict.¶ War’s decline isn’t accidental, in other words. It’s by design.¶
4.
Rates of murder and other violent crimes are in free-fall.¶ Britain Unrest¶ CREDIT: AKIRA SUEMORI/AP PHOTOS¶
Pinker’s trend against violence isn’t limited just to war. It seems likes crimes, both of the sort states
commit against their citizens and citizens commit against each other, are also on the decline.¶ Take a few
examples. Slavery, once commonly sanctioned by governments, is illegal everywhere on earth. The use of torture as legal
punishment has gone down dramatically. The European murder rate fell 35-fold from the Middle Ages to
the beginning of the 20th century (check out this amazing 2003 paper from Michael Eisner, who dredged up medieval records to
estimate European homicide rates in the swords-and-chivalry era, if you don’t believe me).¶ The decline has been especially marked in recent
years. Though homicide crime rates climbed back up from their historic lows between the 1970s and 1990s, reversing progress made since the
late 19th century, they have collapsed worldwide in the 21st century. 557,000
people were murdered in 2001 — almost
three times as many as were killed in war that year. In 2008, that number was 289,000, and the
homicide rate has been declining in 75 percent of nations since then.¶ Statistics from around the developed world,
where numbers are particularly reliable, show that it’s not just homicide that’s on the wane: it’s almost all violent
crime. US government numbers show that violent crime in the United States declined from a peak of about 750 crimes per 100,000
Americans to under 450 by 2009. G7 as a whole countries show huge declines in homicide, robbery, and vehicle theft.¶ So even in countries
that aren’t at poor or at war, most people’s lives are getting safer and more secure. Why?¶ We know it’s not incarceration. While the United
States and Britain have dramatically increased their prison populations, others, like Canada, the Netherlands, and Estonia, reduced their
incarceration rates and saw similar declines in violent crime. Same thing state-to-state in the United States; New York imprisoned fewer people
and saw the fastest crime decline in the country.¶ The Economist’s deep dive into the explanations for crime’s collapse provides a few answers.
Globally, police have gotten better at working with communities and targeting areas with the most crime. They’ve also gotten new toys, like
DNA testing, that make it easier to catch criminals.¶ The crack epidemic in the United States and its heroin twin in Europe have both slowed
down dramatically. Rapid gentrification has made inner-city crime harder. And the increasing cheapness of “luxury” goods like iPods and DVD
players has reduced incentives for crime on both the supply and demand sides: stealing a DVD player isn’t as profitable, and it’s easier for a
would-be thief to buy one in the first place.¶ But there’s one explanation The Economist dismissed that strikes me as hugely important: the
abolition of lead gasoline. Kevin
Drum at Mother Jones wrote what’s universally acknowledged to be the
definitive argument for the lead/crime link, and it’s incredibly compelling. We know for a fact that lead
exposure damages people’s brains and can potentially be fatal; that’s why an international campaign to
ban leaded gasoline started around 1970. Today, leaded gasoline is almost unheard of — it’s banned in 175
countries, and there’s been a decline in lead blood levels by about 90 percent.¶ Drum marshals a wealth of evidence that the
parts of the brain damaged by lead are the same ones that check people’s aggressive impulses. Moreover,
the timing matches up: crime shot up in the mid-to-late-20th century as cars spread around the world, and started to decline in the 70s as the
anti-lead campaign was succeeding. Here’s close the relationship is, using data from the United States:¶ Lead_Crime_325¶ Now, non-homicide
violent crime appears to have ticked up in 2012, based on U.S. government surveys of victims of crime, but it’s
very possible that’s
just a blip: the official Department of Justice report says up-front that “the apparent increase in the rate of violent crimes reported to police
from 2011 to 2012 was not statistically significant.Ӧ So we have no reason to believe crime is making a come back, and every reason to believe
the historical decline in criminal violence is here to stay.¶
5. There’s less racism, sexism, and other forms of
discrimination in the world.¶ Nelson Mandela¶ CREDIT: THEANA CALITZ/AP IMAGES¶ Racism, sexism, anti-Semitism,
homophobia, and other forms of discrimination remain, without a doubt, extraordinarily powerful
forces. The statistical and experimental evidence is overwhelming — this irrefutable proof of widespread discrimination against AfricanAmericans, for instance, should put the “racism is dead” fantasy to bed.¶ Yet the need to combat discrimination denial shouldn’t blind us to
the good news. Over the centuries, humanity
has made extraordinary progress in taming its hate for and illtreatment of other humans on the basis of difference alone. Indeed, it is very likely that we live in the
least discriminatory era in the history of modern civilization. It’s not a huge prize given how bad the past
had been, but there are still gains worth celebrating.¶ Go back 150 years in time and the point should be
obvious. Take four prominent groups in 1860: African-Americans were in chains, European Jews were routinely
massacred in the ghettos and shtetls they were confined to, women around the world were denied the opportunity to work outside the home
and made almost entirely subordinate to their husbands, and LGBT people were invisible. The improvements in each of these group’s statuses
today, both in the United States and internationally, are incontestable. ¶ On closer look, we
have reason to believe the happy
trends are likely to continue. Take racial discrimination. In 2000, Harvard sociologist Lawrence Bobo
penned a comprehensive assessment of the data on racial attitudes in the United States. He found a
“national consensus” on the ideals of racial equality and integration. “A nation once comfortable as a
deliberately segregationist and racially discriminatory society has not only abandoned that view,” Bobo
writes, “but now overtly positively endorses the goals of racial integration and equal treatment. There is
no sign whatsoever of retreat from this ideal, despite events that many thought would call it into
question. The magnitude, steadiness, and breadth of this change should be lost on no one.Ӧ The norm
against overt racism has gone global. In her book on the international anti-apartheid movement in the 1980s, Syracuse’s Audie
Klotz says flatly that “the illegitimacy of white minority rule led to South Africa’s persistent diplomatic, cultural, and economic isolation.” The
belief that racial discrimination could not be tolerated had become so widespread, Klotz argues, that it united the globe — including
governments that had strategic interests in supporting South Africa’s whites — in opposition to apartheid. In 2011, 91 percent of respondents
in a sample of 21 diverse countries said that equal treatment of people of different races or ethnicities was important to them.¶ Racism
obviously survived both American and South African apartheid, albeit in more subtle, insidious forms.
“The death of Jim Crow racism has left us in an uncomfortable place,” Bobo writes, “a state of laissez-faire racism” where racial discrimination
and disparities still exist, but support for the kind of aggressive government policies needed to address them is racially polarized. But
there’s reason to hope that’ll change as well: two massive studies of the political views of younger
Americans by my TP Ideas colleagues, John Halpin and Ruy Teixeira, found that millenials were
significantly more racially tolerant and supportive of government action to address racial disparities
than the generations that preceded them. Though I’m not aware of any similar research of on a global scale, it’s hard not to
imagine they’d find similar results, suggesting that we should have hope that the power of racial prejudice may be waning.¶ The story
about gender discrimination is very similar: after the feminist movement’s enormous victories in the
20th century, structural sexism still shapes the world in profound ways, but the cause of gender equality
is making progress. In 2011, 86 percent of people in a diverse 21 country sample said that equal
treatment on the basis of gender was an important value. The U.N.’s Human Development Report’s
Gender Inequality Index — a comprehensive study of reproductive health, social empowerment, and
labor market equity — saw a 20 percent decline in observable gender inequalities from 1995 to 2011.
IMF data show consistent global declines in wage disparities between genders, labor force participation, and
educational attainment around the world. While enormous inequality remains, 2013 is looking to be the worst year for sexism in history.¶
Finally, we’ve made astonishing progress on sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination —
largely in the past 15 years. At the beginning of 2003, zero Americans lived in marriage equality states;
by the end of 2013, 38 percent of Americans will. Article 13 of the European Community Treaty bans discrimination on the
grounds of sexual orientation, and, in 2011, the UN Human Rights Council passed a resolution committing the council to documenting and
exposing discrimination on orientation or identity grounds around the world. The public
opinion trends are positive
worldwide: all of the major shifts from 2007 to 2013 in Pew’s “acceptance of homosexuality” poll were
towards greater tolerance, and young people everywhere are more open to equality for LGBT individuals than their older peers.¶
best_year_graphics-04¶ Once again, these victories are partial and by no means inevitable. Racism, sexism,
homophobia, and other forms of discrimination aren’t just “going away” on their own. They’re losing
their hold on us because people are working to change other people’s minds and because governments
are passing laws aimed at promoting equality. Positive trends don’t mean the problems are close to
solved, and certainly aren’t excuses for sitting on our hands.¶ That’s true of everything on this list. The fact that fewer people are dying from
war and disease doesn’t lessen the moral imperative to do something about those that are; the fact that people are getting richer and safer in
their homes isn’t an excuse for doing more to address poverty and crime.¶ But too often, the worst parts about the world are treated as
inevitable, the prospect of radical victory over pain and suffering dismissed as utopian fantasy. The overwhelming force of the evidence shows
that to be false. As best we can tell, the reason humanity is getting better is because humans have decided to make the world a better place.
We consciously chose to develop lifesaving medicine and build freer political systems; we’ve passed laws against workplace discrimination and
poisoning children’s minds with lead.¶ So far, these choices have more than paid off. It’s up to us to make sure they continue to.
Using the state is necessary to fight sexism.
Catherine MacKinnon, University of Michigan Law School Elizabeth A. Long Law Professor, 2005,
“Women’s Lives, Men’s Laws, p. 42-3
There is a legitimate question, though, about the relation between law and the power that produces it, and
the degree to which change in one produces change in the other. Whatever we know about how change is
made, we do know that no change in one produces no change in the other. Women's experience makes
us suspicious of making women's legal exclusion and marginalization and invisibility into a radical virtue,
even as the antistate position usually stops short of opposing pornography, which the state is clearly
for. Women's everyday lives make us suspicious of the view that rights, especially equality rights, do
not matter, even as many who take this position have rights while women in general do not.27 Our
lives make us suspicious of abdicating the state-in favor of what? those bastions of sensitivity and
receptivity to women, the media and organized labor? Besides, what does it mean to abdicate a society
you are excluded from, besides further exclusion? It does not stop affecting you when you stop
trying to affect it. Surely one of the most effective strategies for maintaining a system of dominance
is to convince those who seek to end it that the tools of dominance must be left in the hands of the
dominant. Women need institutional support for equality, both because of and in spite of the fact that
power in women's hands is different from power in men's hands. Getting power is not the same as
transforming it, but how are we supposed to transform it if we cannot get it? How can it be changed if it is
authoritatively defined in male terms and retained in male hands? I am tired of people who have powerwhether they identify with it or not-telling women that we can only have power if we transform it. They
might begin by insisting it be transformed in the hands of those who already have it. They might also
explain how they plan to produce equality without institutional support, indeed while leaving in
place present legal structures that enforce women's inequality. It's like telling women we should
transform the state in the face of a law that deprives us of the right to vote. What are we supposed
to do? Picket and hope they listen? Start a new state? Get the bomb? Why aren't any of these critics
doing any of these things or their equivalent? I would also really like to hear their argument against the
franchise. Not why it is limited; why its limits mean we should not fight for it and be able to vote at all.
Maybe they think it is only symbolic. Whoever says law cannot make change so we should not try
might explain why the law should be exempt in the struggle for social transformation. Some of us
suspect that women, in particular, are being told that not much can be done with law because a lot can be.
If law were to be made to work for women, the relation of law to life, as well as its content, might have to
change in the process. As more women become lawyers and maybe the law starts to listen to women,
perhaps the legal profession will decline in prestige and power. Maybe women using law will
delegitimize law, and male supremacy-in its endless adaptability and ingenuity will have to find other
guises for the dominance it currently exercises through law. This is not to urge a top-down model of
change or to advocate merely inverting or reshuffling the demographics of existing structures of power, or
to say that law alone solves anything. It is to say that putting power in the hands of the powerless can
change power as well as the situation of the powerless. It is also to urge a confrontational
engagement with existing institutions: one that refuses to let power off the hook. Integral to a larger
political movement on all levels, this is a demand that law recognize that women live here, too.
Every day of our lives.
EXTN – Uniqueness – Sexism
World is getting better – 2013 was the best year on the planet – every metric goes
[insert side], people are living longer, less people are experiencing war, the world is
richer, equality is a priority globally and sexism has quantifiably decreased – that’s
Beauchamp. Prefer it – our ev takes into account their args – their ev cites
snapshots, our cites trends and has recency.
Squo is structurally improving – multiple indicators.
Lomborg, Copenhagen Business School professor, 10-16-13
[Bjorn, “A Better World Is Here” http://www.project-syndicate.org/print/bj-rn-lomborgon-the-decliningcosts-of-global-problems]
For centuries, optimists and pessimists have argued over the state of the world. Pessimists see a world
where more people means less food, where rising demand for resources means depletion and war, and,
in recent decades, where boosting production capacity means more pollution and global warming. One of
the current generation of pessimists’ sacred texts, The Limits to Growth, influences the environmental movement to this day.¶ The
optimists, by contrast, cheerfully claim that everything – human health, living standards, environmental
quality, and so on – is getting better. Their opponents think of them as “cornucopian” economists, placing their faith in the
market to fix any and all problems.¶ But, rather than picking facts and stories to fit some grand narrative of decline
or progress, we should try to compare across all areas of human existence to see if the world really is
doing better or worse. Together with 21 of the world’s top economists, I have tried to do just that,
developing a scorecard spanning 150 years. Across ten areas – including health, education, war, gender,
air pollution, climate change, and biodiversity – the economists all answered the same question: What
was the relative cost of this problem in every year since 1900, all the way to 2013, with predictions to
2050.¶ Using classic economic valuations of everything from lost lives, bad health, and illiteracy to wetlands destruction and increased
hurricane damage from global warming, the economists show how much each problem costs. To estimate the magnitude of the problem, it is
compared to the total resources available to fix it. This gives us the problem’s size as a share of GDP. And the trends since 1900 are sometimes
surprising.¶ Consider
gender inequality. Essentially, we were excluding almost half the world’s population from production. In
1900, only 15% of the global workforce was female. What is the loss from lower female workforce participation? Even
taking into account that someone has to do unpaid housework and the increased costs of female
education, the loss was at least 17% of global GDP in 1900. Today, with higher female participation and
lower wage differentials, the loss is 7% – and projected to fall to 4% by 2050.¶ It will probably come as a big
surprise that climate change is expected to be mostly an increasing net benefit – rising to about 1.5% of GDP per year – in the period from 1900
to 2025. This is because global warming has mixed effects; for moderate warming, the benefits prevail.¶ On one hand, because CO2 works as a
fertilizer, higher levels have been a boon for agriculture, which comprises the biggest positive impact, at 0.8% of GDP. Likewise, moderate
warming prevents more cold deaths than the number of extra heat deaths that it causes. It also reduces demand for heating more than it
increases the costs of cooling, implying a gain of about 0.4% of GDP. On the other hand, warming increases water stress, costing about 0.2% of
GDP, and negatively affects ecosystems like wetlands, at a cost of about 0.1%.¶ As temperatures rise, however, the costs will rise and the
benefits will decline, leading to a dramatic reduction in net benefits. After
the year 2070, global warming will become a net
cost to the world, justifying cost-effective climate action now and in the decades to come.¶ Yet, to put
matters in perspective, the scorecard also shows us that the world’s biggest environmental problem by
far is indoor air pollution. Today, indoor pollution from cooking and heating with bad fuels kills more than three
million people annually, or the equivalent of a loss of 3% of global GDP. But in 1900, the cost was 19% of GDP, and it is expected to
drop to 1% of GDP by 2050.¶ Health indicators worldwide have shown some of the largest improvements.
Human life expectancy barely changed before the late eighteenth century. Yet it is difficult to overstate
the magnitude of the gain since 1900: in that year, life expectancy worldwide was 32 years, compared to
69 now (and a projection of 76 years in 2050).¶ The biggest factor was the fall in infant mortality. For
example, even as late as 1970, only around 5% of infants were vaccinated against measles, tetanus,
whooping cough, diphtheria, and polio. By 2000, it was 85%, saving about three million lives annually –
more, each year, than world peace would have saved in the twentieth century.¶ This success has many parents. The Gates Foundation and the
GAVI Alliance have spent more than $2.5 billion and promised another $10 billion for vaccines. Efforts by the Rotary Club, the World Health
Organization, and many others have reduced polio by 99% worldwide since 1979.¶ In
economic terms, the cost of poor health
at the outset of the twentieth century was an astounding 32% of global GDP. Today, it is down to about
11%, and by 2050 it will be half that.¶ While the optimists are not entirely right (loss of biodiversity in the
twentieth century probably cost about 1% of GDP per year, with some places losing much more), the overall picture is clear. Most
of the topics in the scorecard show improvements of 5-20% of GDP. And the overall trend is even
clearer. Global problems have declined dramatically relative to the resources available to tackle them.¶ Of
course, this does not mean that there are no more problems. Although much smaller, problems in health, education, malnutrition, air pollution,
gender inequality, and trade remain large.¶ But realists
should now embrace the view that the world is doing much
better. Moreover, the scorecard shows us where the substantial challenges remain for a better 2050. We
should guide our future attention not on the basis of the scariest stories or loudest pressure groups, but on objective assessments of where we
can do the most good.
Living conditions for women have been improving.
Heartfield, Mute Magazine, 11-25-13
[James, “Intersectional? Or just sectarian?” http://rosswolfe.wordpress.com/2013/11/25/you-cant-spellintersectionality-without-sect/]
It is an approach that fails to see the positive things that unite people. Over the last century the social
condition of women in the developed world has improved markedly. Women who were pointedly
excluded from political power, denied civil and property rights, and excluded from the world of work are
today enfranchised, property owners and half a greatly expanded workforce. Far from being at odds,
surveys of social attitudes find that in their values men and women are becoming more alike, more liberal
and self-assured. At the same time legislation on lesbian and gay rights has moved towards effective
equality.
EXTN – Links – Sexism
Sweeping reformism K is wrong. Increases oppression through isolation.
Hahnel, American University economics professor, 2005
[Robin, “Fighting For Reforms Without Becoming Reformist” http://zcomm.org/znetarticle/fighting-forreforms-without-becoming-reformist-by-robin-hahnel/]
What To Avoid¶ ¶ We
need look no further than to the history of twentieth century social democracy to see
how fighting for reforms can make a movement reformist. Social democrats began the twentieth century
determined to replace capitalism with socialism — which they understood to be a system of equitable cooperation based on
democratic planning by workers, consumers, and citizens. Long before the century was over social democratic parties and
movements throughout the world had renounced the necessity of replacing private enterprise and markets
with fundamentally different economic institutions, and pledged themselves only to pursue reforms
geared toward making a system based on competition and greed which they accepted as inevitable more
humane. As a result social democrats were doomed to grappled with two dilemmas: (1) What to do when leaving the system intact makes it
impossible to further promote economic justice and democracy, much less environmental sustainability. (2) What to do when further reforms
destabilize a system one has agreed to accept while the system constantly threatens to undermine hard won gains. Social democrats struggled
unsuccessfully with these dilemmas, all too often abandoning important components of economic justice and democracy and denouncing political
tendencies to their left whose programs they considered politically or economically destabilizing. ¶ ¶ We
need look no further than to
the history of twentieth century libertarian socialism to see how failing to embrace reform struggles can
isolate a movement and make it irrelevant. The principle failure of libertarian socialists during the
twentieth century was their inability to understand the necessity and importance of reform organizing.
When it turned out that anti-capitalist uprisings were few and far between, and libertarian socialists
proved incapable of sustaining the few that did occur early in the twentieth century, their reticence to throw
themselves into reform campaigns, and ineptness when they did, doomed libertarian socialists to more than a half century of decline after their
devastating defeat during the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939. What too many libertarian socialists failed to realize was that any transition to a
democratic and equitable economy has no choice but to pass through reform campaigns, organizations, and institutions however tainted and
corrupting they may be. The new left tried to exorcise the dilemma that reform work is necessary but corrupting with the concept of non-reformist
reforms. According to this theory the solution to the dilemma was for activists to work on non-reformist reforms, i.e. reforms that improve
people’s lives while undermining the material, social, or ideological underpinnings of the capitalist system. There is nothing wrong with the
notion of winning reforms while undermining capitalism. As a matter of fact, that is a concise description of pecisely what we must be about!
What was misleading was the notion that there are particular reforms that are like silver bullets and accomplish this because of something special
about the nature of those reforms themselves.¶ ¶ The Myth of the Non-Reformist Reform¶ ¶ There
is no such thing as a nonreformist reform. Social democrats and libertarian socialists did not err because they somehow failed to
find and campaign for this miraculous kind of reform. Nor would new leftists prove successful where
others had failed before them because new leftists found a special kind of reform different from those
social democrats championed and libertarian socialists shied away from. Some reforms improve peoples
lives more, and some less. Some reforms are easier to win, and some are harder to win. Some reforms are easier to
defend, and some are less so. And of course, different reforms benefit different groups of people. Those are ways reforms,
themselves, differ. On the other hand, there are also crucial differences in how reforms are fought for. Reforms can be fought for by
reformers preaching the virtues of capitalism. Or reforms can be fought for by anti-capitalists pointing out that only by replacing capitalism will it
be possible to fully achieve what reformers want. Reforms can be fought for while leaving institutions of repression intact. Or a reform struggle
can at least weaken repressive institutions, if not destroy them. Reforms can be fought for by hierarchical organizations that reinforce
authoritarian, racist, and sexist dynamics and thereby weaken the overall movement for progressive change. Or reforms can be fought for by
democratic organizations that uproot counter productive patterns of behavior and empower people to become masters and mistresses of their
fates. Reforms can be fought for in ways that leave no new organizations or institutions in their aftermath. Or reforms can be fought for in ways
that create new organizations and institutions that fortify progressive forces in the next battle. Reforms can be fought for through alliances that
obstruct possibilities for further gains. Or the alliances forged to win a reform can establish the basis for winning more reforms. Reforms can be
fought for in ways that provide tempting possibilities for participants, and particularly leaders, to take unfair personal advantage of group success.
Or they can be fought for in ways that minimize the likelihood of corrupting influences. Finally, reform organizing can be the entire program of
organizations and movements. Or, recognizing that reform organizing within capitalism is prone to weaken the personal and political resolve of
participants to pursue a full system of equitable cooperation, reform work can be combined with other kinds of activities, programs, and
institutions that rejuvenate the battle weary and prevent burn out and sell out.¶ ¶ In
sum, any reform can be fought for in ways
that diminish the chances of further gains and limit progressive change in other areas, or fought for in
ways that make further progress more likely and facilitate other progressive changes as well. But if
reforms are successful they will make capitalism less harmful to some extent. There is no way around
this, and even if there were such a thing as a non-reformist reform, it would not change this fact. However,
the fact that every reform success makes capitalism less harmful does not mean successful reforms
necessarily prolong the life of capitalism — although it might, and this is something anti-capitalists must
simply learn to accept. But if winning a reform further empowers the reformers, and whets their appetite
for more democracy, more economic justice, and more environmental protection than capitalism can
provide, it can hasten the fall of capitalism.¶ ¶ In any case, it turns out we are a more cautious and social species than twentieth
century libertarian socialists realized. And it turns out that capitalism is far more resilient than libertarian socialists
expected it to be. More than a half century of libertarian socialist failures belie the myth that it is possible for social revolutionaries
committed to democracy to eschew reform work without becoming socially isolated. Avoidance of participation in reform work
is simply not a viable option and only guarantees defeat for any who opt out. Moreover, no miraculous
non-reformist reform is going to come riding to our rescue. Though many twentieth century libertarian socialists failed to
realize it, their only hope was to throw themselves wholeheartedly into reform struggles while searching for ways to minimize the corrupting
pressures that inevitably are brought to bear on them as a result.
The critique of the public/private divide is too totalizing – women were never fully
excluded from the public – ceding the political becomes self-fulfilling.
Connell, Macquarie University sociology professor, 1990
[RW, Theory and Society, Vol. 19, No. 5, “The State, Gender, and Sexual Politics: Theory and Appraisal”
JSTOR, p.522]
A key part of the liberal state was the creation of a system of representation,¶ elected parliaments and
officials. This system was closely linked¶ to an emerging distinction between a "public" sphere, in which
representation¶ occurred, and a private sphere of domestic and personal life.¶ Feminist historians have
traced the nineteenth-century construction of¶ a feminized "domestic" realm, increasingly seen as the
exclusive sphere¶ of women. The link between the two, in the bourgeois ideal adopted by¶ much of the
labor movement also, was the husband/father: he was the¶ economic actor (wage-earner or property
owner) and the citizen of the¶ state.
Though powerful as ideology, this model never reflected reality.¶ Among other things it drastically
underestimated women's economic¶ activity, and ignored women's role as cultural producers (for
example,¶ novelists) and lobbyists in church and politics. Unless women could be¶ absolutely controlled by
a domestic patriarch, the liberal model of citizenship¶ contained a major contradiction - forcefully pointed
out by¶ J. S. Mill. Domestic patriarchy was never up to the task. The result was¶ deepening problems of
legitimacy for the state, which gave the women's¶ suffrage movement leverage, and drove an expansion
of the system of¶ representation toward the contemporary model of universal citizenship¶ and plebiscitary
elections.33
Feminist withdrawal from politics reinforces oppression
Carl Boggs, National University Social Science Professor, 2000, “The End of Politics,” p. 176-7
Ecofeminist denigration of politics comes across most clearly in the role assigned to the household, or domestic sphere, as the main source of
women's identity and self-oriented activity. Biehl shows that the ecofeminist idea of community does not really go much beyond the oikos
(household), which takes clear precedence over the polis; indeed "women's values" gain expression almost exclusively in boundaries of the oikos.
While a vibrant domestic life can be a strong bulwark of community, a stubborn truth has persisted, namely, that it is only in the public sphere
that human interaction and decision making have distinctly society-wide implications. In romanticizing the household, therefore, goddess worship
puts forth a parochial vision of social life in which politics is either dissolved into the oikos or relegated to a male-dominated polis. In either case,
the ideal of citizenship is ultimately broken up and destroyed.25 This feminist"
withdrawal from politics constitutes a form
of inverted statism insofar as it allows the patriarchal state apparatus to wield power with relatively few
impediments. While the search for spiritual wholeness and universal togetherness, along with quick panaceas for multilayered social
problems, has been a constant feature of human history, never has this search given rise to such a large and influential subculture as in the United
States since the 1960s. For millions of Americans it has become the defining motif of the times. New-age ideas in many guises proliferate in a
society dominated by inaccessible bureaucratic organizations and dispirited by the crumbling of traditional belief systems-including not only
religion but the core liberal ideology itself. As Jurgen Habermas argues, a system held together mainly by instrumental rationality is bound to
generate repeated crises of legitimization; the current popularity of metaphysical options is unquestionably a reflection of such crises. Individual
attachment to new-age thinking- is both convenient and reassuring in its promise of security and transcendence. It may be comforting to believe
that social or institutional challenge cannot take place until requisite personal changes are achieved, that there is no distinction between victim
and victimizer (which means no target has to be confronted), that historical analysis of actual, living, concrete social forces is unnecessary, and
that political activity is destined to be just a waste of time. The rationale for privatized withdrawal into the realm of “self-development” and
personal consumption is thus fully established. This is hardly coincidental since, as Parenti aptly points out, beneath all the spiritual rhetoric of
“transcendence and “harmony—beneath
the lofty critiques and disavowals of "politics"—lies the age-old pursuit
of material gain in a society that fetishizes possessive individualism.27 Spiritual politics therefore amounts
not so much to a new politics as an end of politics, where authoritarian rule, social hierarchy, and the
capitalist market coexist with a growing devaluation of the public sphere. New-age millenarianism
represents a false overcoming of alienation in which "opposition" to existing values and institutions
masks a profound cynicism or fatalism regarding prospects for social change. As Dana Cloud suggests,
metaphysical pursuits inevitably add up to a concession that the capitalist system is stable and bound to
last indefinitely.28 Even granting its professed transformative intent, however, utopianism of this sort indulges the same
low sense of political efficacy that is so widespread in the culture as a whole. One function of such ideas is that
they frequently nurture dreams of a flight from society in toto-dreams that, as Harold Bloom writes, have become particularly strong in the
United States with the emergence of a "post-Christian" ethos.29 The perpetual search for harmony, spiritual oneness, and divine
intervention-realizable largely outside the public sphere-marks a profound turning away from politics that, by the 1990s, had
made a deep imprint on American society.
Paranoia creates ineffective activism.
Maria Farland, Fordham University English and American Studies Professor, 2005, “"Total system, total
solution, total apocalypse": Sex Oppression, Systems of Property, and 1970s Women's Liberation
Fiction,” The Yale Journal of Criticism 18.2 (2005) 381-407
Freedom is thus embodied in the limbo space of free-fall flight. That free-fall—like Brodkey's
ascension to a "Godly sphere" of sexual pleasure—is a sphere of absolute isolation from the dynamics
of hierarchical and repressive institutions whose workings the novel goes to such great lengths to elucidate. The coercive dimension of
closed social systems—whether communist or capitalist—gives way to the cavernous void of the Grand Canyon, plunging Isadora into an open-ended atmosphere
If social relations are saturated by hierarchy, in this view, the only escape
from such oppression is otherworldly transcendence. Such transcendence is best approximated in the metaphorics of a heavenly
sphere—Brodkey's afterlife—or those of a heavenly atmosphere—Jong's Grand Canyon. Paradoxically, the vision of the personal as political
can only be elaborated via an encounter with the impersonal: an encounter with a vast, impersonal
heavenly sphere, or a merging with the infinite space of nature devoid of persons. In both cases,
flight and ascension provide the vehicle for women's liberation, and liberation takes shape in a
sphere of removal that transcends the divisions and deformations of a debased social world. Fear of
apart from any social system whatsoever.
Flying is illuminating for what it shows us about what Jong and her women's liberationist contemporaries saw as the promises and pitfalls of "free love." It is also
enormously instructive as a barometer of the historically specific conflicts that shaped 1970s feminism. For many writers of the decade, the rhetorical conjunction of
sexual oppression and oppressive social systems served to represent the personal through the evocation of the political. Indeed, from another perspective, we might
the formulation "the personal is political" originates in part out of a disenchantment with
earlier efforts to locate women's liberation on the terrain of political systems that organize [End
say that
Page 401] property, whether capitalist or communist. In many instances, liberation from such allpervasive systems can only be found in otherworldly transcendence—transcendence that affords total
removal from the debilitating nexus of sexual-social norms. Surprisingly, for the generation that would
insist that the personal is political, it is frequently impersonal entities—heaven, nature, and space—
that provide the linguistic register through which liberation can be imagined. As these protagonists
retreat from the terrain of the political into terra incognita, women's liberationists take their leave
from sexual liberation and from the social systems that oppress and subordinate women. In many
respects, these narratives screen out conflict and struggle altogether, removing their protagonists to
a sanitized realm apart from the hierarchy, struggle, and conflict that politics entails. Ironically,
sexual liberation is achieved through an escape from sex into death—an escape from the deadening
social-sexual nexus of "invisible" and coercive patriarchal institutions, into the broad horizons of
ascension and flight. Such a space of liberation, if it could be reached, is without a doubt free from
the coercions and conflicts of the patriarchal past. But such rarefied visions of freedom hold limited
prospects for women's and sexual liberation in the future. In her otherwise celebratory history of women's liberation in these
years, Alice Echols poses the question of the movement's inability to generate popular support in the years that followed 1975. If today's young women are indifferent
or post-feminist, their quiescence may be the product of our continued allegiance to theoretical concepts and categories forged in the crucible of 1975 feminism's
carceral visions. If "since 1975 feminism has been more notable for its theoretical achievements than for its political accomplishment," as Echols suggests, this
The paranoid mood and
carceral visions of these years may be more conducive to apathy and paralysis than to activism. In
turn, feminism's retreat from materialism—the material body and the material conditions of
women's existence—may inhibit women from taking up body-related issues in the domain of
politics, as Toril Moi has argued.123 The suspicion of social institutions and systems that is lurking
behind this position would also impair the creation of solutions to problems that require
coordinated and in some cases centrally planned solutions. Many of the issues that still plague
women today—health care, day care, and birth control, to name a few—are problems that may
require institutional or state-mandated solutions. Many are not necessarily addressed by the ongoing emphasis on normativity and sex roles. By continuing to rely on the concepts and categories
that are the product of an outdated historical moment, we may risk continuing to neglect these
issues. More broadly, the fantasies of escape [End Page 402] and extrication traced here provide a
dubious basis for social change: solve the problem of sexual oppression through celibacy; solve the
problem of gender oppression by getting rid of gender. As we continue to rely heavily on the analytic
tools of the 1970s, we risk remaining mired in a crippling "total system" paradigm whose only real
outcome is paralytic struggles with an all-powerful system of norms.
emphasis may well be the legacy of 1975 feminism's pessimism about the possibility of social and political change.122
State-based reforms are critical to mobilization and effectiveness.
Connell, Macquarie University sociology professor, 1990
[RW, Theory and Society, Vol. 19, No. 5, “The State, Gender, and Sexual Politics: Theory and Appraisal”
JSTOR, p.530-2]
5. Because of its power to regulate and its power to create, the state is a¶ major stake in gender politics;
and the exercise of that power is a constant¶ incitement to claim the stake. Thus the state becomes the
focus of¶ interest-group formation and mobilization in sexual politics.
It is worth recalling just how wide the liberal state's activity in relation¶ to gender is. This activity
includes family policy, population policy,¶ labor force and labor market management, housing policy,
regulation¶ of sexual behavior and expression, provision of child care, mass education,¶ taxation and
income redistribution, the creation and use of military¶ forces - and that is not the whole of it. This is not
a sideline; it is a¶ major realm of state policy. Control of the machinery that conducts¶ these activities is a
massive asset in gender politics. In many situations it¶ will be tactically decisive.
The state is therefore a focus for the mobilization of interests that is¶ central to gender politics on the
large scale. Feminism's historical concern¶ with the state, and attempts to capture a share of state power,¶
appear in this light as a necessary response to a historical reality. They¶ are not an error brought on by an
overdose of liberalism or a capitulation¶ to patriarchy. As Franzway puts it, the state is unavoidable for¶
feminism. The question is not whether feminism will deal with the state,¶ but how: on what terms, with
what tactics, toward what goals.5"¶ The same is true of the politics of homosexuality among men. The
earliest¶ attempts to agitate for toleration produced a half-illegal, half-academic¶ mode of organizing that
reached its peak in Weimar Germany,¶ and was smashed by the Nazis. (The Institute of Sexual Science
was¶ vandalized and its library burnt in 1933; later, gay men were sent to¶ concentration camps or shot.) A
long period of lobbying for legal¶ reform followed, punctuated by bouts of state repression. (Homosexual¶
men were, for instance, targeted in the McCarthyite period in the¶ United States.) The gay liberation
movement changed the methods and¶ expanded the goals to include social revolution, but still dealt with
the¶ state over policing, de-criminalization, and anti-discrimination. Since¶ the early 1970s gay politics has
evolved a complex mixture of confrontation,¶ cooperation, and representation. In some cities, including
San¶ Francisco and Sydney, gay men as such have successfully run for public¶ office. Around the AIDS
crisis of the 1980s, in countries such as the¶ United States and Australia, gay community based
organizations and¶ state health services have entered a close - if often tense - long-term¶ relationship.'
In a longer historical perspective, all these forms of politics are fairly¶ new. Fantasies like Aristophanes's
Lysistrata aside, the open mobilization¶ of groups around demands or programs in sexual politics dates¶
only from the mid-nineteenth century. The politics that characterized¶ other patriarchal gender orders in
history were constructed along other¶ lines, for instance as a politics of kinship, or faction formation in
agricultural¶ villages. It can plausibly be argued that modern patterns resulted¶ from a reconfiguration of
gender politics around the growth of¶ the liberal state. In particular its structure of legitimation through¶
plebiscite or electoral democracy invited the response of popular¶ mobilization.
Reformism is necessary and possible – historical patriarchy shouldn’t preclude
developing tactics to reclaim the vestiges of power.
Connell, Macquarie University sociology professor, 1990
[RW, Theory and Society, Vol. 19, No. 5, “The State, Gender, and Sexual Politics: Theory and Appraisal”
JSTOR, p.535-60-2]
Appraisals¶ Is the state patriarchal? Yes, beyond any argument, on the evidence discussed¶ above. It is not
"essentially patriarchal" or "male"; even if one¶ could speak of the "essence" of a social institution, this
would exaggerate¶ the internal coherence of the state. Rather the state is historically¶ patriarchal,
patriarchal as a matter of concrete social practices. State¶ structures in recent history institutionalize the
European equation between¶ authority and a dominating masculinity; they are effectively controlled¶ by
men; and they operate with a massive bias towards heterosexual¶ men's interests.
At the same time the pattern of state patriarchy changes. In terms of the¶ depth of oppression and the
historical possibilities of resistance and¶ transformation, a fascist regime is crucially different from a
liberal one,¶ and a liberal one from a revolutionary one. The most favorable historical¶ circumstance for
progressive sexual politics seems to be the early¶ days of social-revolutionary regimes; but the later
bureaucratization of¶ these regimes is devastating. Next best is a liberal state with a reformist ¶ government;
though reforms introduced under its aegis are vulnerable¶ in periods of reaction.
Though the state is patriarchal, progressive gender politics cannot¶ avoid it. The character of the state as
the central institutionalization of¶ power, and its historical trajectory in the regulation and constitution of¶
gender relations, make it unavoidably a major arena for challenges to¶ patriarchy. Here liberal feminism
is on strong ground.¶ Becoming engaged in practical struggles for a share of state power requires tactical
judgments about what developments within the state¶ provide opportunities. In the 1980s certain
strategies of reform have¶ had a higher relative pay-off than they did before. In Australia, for¶ instance, the
creation of a network of "women's services" was a feature¶ of the 1970s, and the momentum of this kind
of action has died away.¶ Reforms that have few budgetary implications but fit in with other state¶
strategies, such as modernizing the bureaucracy, become more prominent.¶ Equal employment opportunity
and anti-discrimination legislation¶ have been highlighted; decriminalizing homosexuality is consistent¶
with this.
Rights work.
Connell, Macquarie University sociology professor, 1990
[RW, Theory and Society, Vol. 19, No. 5, “The State, Gender, and Sexual Politics: Theory and Appraisal”
JSTOR, p.512-3]
The implicit discourse of gender in accounts of the state is brought to¶ the surface by liberal feminism, a
tradition of thought with a 200-year¶ history embracing Wollstonecraft and Mill in Britain, Stanton and¶
Friedan in the United States. Liberal feminism took the doctrine of¶ "rights" seriously and turned it
against the patriarchal model of citizenship.¶ "Equal rights" is more than a slogan, it is a wholly logical
doctrine¶ that is as effective against the "aristocracy of sex" as the doctrine¶ of the "rights of man" was
against the aristocracy of property."'
The concept of rights is connected with a particular concept of the¶ state. In this view the state is, or
ought to be, a neutral arbiter between¶ conflicting interests and a guarantor of individual rights. The right
to a¶ voice in its proceedings is given by citizenship. Liberal feminism adopts¶ this view of the state, with
one significant shift: it argues that empirically¶ the state is not neutral in its treatment of women. Liberal
feminism,¶ in effect, treats the state as an arbiter that has been captured by a particular¶ group, men. This
analysis leads directly to a strategy for redress:¶ capture it back. If women's situation is defined as a case
of imperfect¶ citizenship, the answer is full citizenship. If men presently run the¶ governments, armies,
and bureaucracies, the solution is more access,¶ packing more and more women into the top levels of the
state until¶ balance is achieved.
In its own territory this is a powerful and sharp-edged analysis. It¶ underpins what successes the women's
movement has had in dealings¶ with the liberal state. The campaign for the suffrage itself was based on¶
this analysis, as were the campaigns for married women's property¶ rights last century and for equal pay in
this century. More recently, liberal¶ feminist logic has led to antidiscrimination laws, equal employment¶
opportunity (EEO) programs, and an expanded recruitment of women¶ to the middle levels of political
power. The themes of the United¶ Nations Decade for Women (1975-85) broadly followed liberal
feminist¶ notions of equal citizenship. Liberal feminism has developed¶ enough leverage to receive
occasional endorsement from the political leadership of the superpowers. Carter in his day endorsed the
ERA;
while Gorbachev seeks to include liberal-feminist themes in perestroika:¶ Today it is imperative for the
country to more actively involve women in the¶ management of the economy, in cultural development and
public life. For¶ this purpose women's councils have been set up throughout the country.'
The state isn’t fixed – historical dynamics can shift – fighting sexism through the
state is possible.
Connell, Macquarie University sociology professor, 1990
[RW, Theory and Society, Vol. 19, No. 5, “The State, Gender, and Sexual Politics: Theory and Appraisal”
JSTOR, p.532-3]
6. The state is constantly changing; gender relations are historically¶ dynamic; the state's position in
gender politics is not fixed. Crisis tendencies¶ develop in the gender order, which allow new political
possibilities.
Much social analysis seems to imply that the state directorate has it¶ easy, that the functional thing to do is
obvious and straightforward. In¶ reality, state elites typically face shifting situations and contradictory¶
pressures that their strategies can only partly resolve. Their power may¶ be destabilized by crisis
tendencies arising from sources outside their¶ control.53
One such is a tendency toward crisis in the legitimation of patriarchy, a¶ breakdown of established bases
of authority. The long-term decline of¶ religion has stripped patriarchy of its main cultural defense. The
rise of¶ the liberal state gave weight to generalizable claims of equality. The use¶ of state power must be
balanced with a search for legitimation if the¶ power is to continue, and legitimation involves the ballotbox credibility¶ of governing parties, the willingness of citizens to pay taxes and obey¶ officials, the
discipline or compliance of state employees. Feminism¶ lays demands on the state that may be difficult to
dodge without putting¶ legitimacy at risk. The liberal feminist platform of equal citizenship,¶
employment rights, and anti-discrimination measures is formulated in a¶ way that maximizes this
leverage on the state. That is one reason why¶ liberal feminism on certain issues has been very effective.
Even the¶ Reagan government found it expedient to appoint women to senior¶ levels of the judiciary.
Working within the state is necessary to break down gender hierarchies and
democratic transitions solve all their offense
Tickner, USC School of International Relations professor, 2001
[J. Ann, International Studies Association President and Wellesley College Center for Research on
Women research scholar, Gendering World Politics: Issues and Approaches in the Post-Cold War Era,
CIAO.net]
Rosi Braidotti has claimed that the feminist vision of women as citizens of the world articulated by
Virginia Woolf and first adopted by women in international movements at the beginning of the
twentieth century is a white, ethnocentric one, far removed from the lives of most women. She sees
dangers in Woolf ’s metaphor of exile from the state; the reality of exile, given the large numbers of
refugees and migrants from war-torn homelands, is too urgent an issue to be taken as metaphor.78
Likewise, Katharine Moon has suggested that Woolf ’s assertion that “the whole world is our country”
is irrelevant when applied to prostitutes serving U.S. military bases in Korea. Those who challenge
the tradition of sovereignty, including transnationalists, feminists, and world-order advocates,
usually live in wealthy states and are empowered enough to call sovereignty a myth. Poor women
do not have this power; for them, the fate of their lives is tied to the economic and political fate
of their own state.79 For these reasons, certain feminists have begun to explore the potential for
emancipatory politics within the state itself. Similar to other critics of liberalism of privilege (see
chapter 3), they are articulating a very different kind of democratic state. Rethinking the State Given
the enormous distance between the local and the international, feminists from various parts of the
world have begun to rethink women’s relationships to the state. While they are quite critical of most
contemporary states, feminists are increasingly looking to the state as a potential buffer against
the detrimental effects of global capitalism. While some feminists believe that capitalism has the
potential to improve women’s welfare, the majority see dangers in global markets that tend toward
inequality and a lack of democratic accountability. Drude Dahlerup has suggested that women are
more dependent on the state than men, particularly in industrialized countries, where women
have greater need of the state’s redistributive functions. Dahlerup has claimed that women can
gain more power through the state than through the market.80 Although they would agree with
critics of globalization that states and international institutions are often working in the interests of
global capital, feminists are beginning to explore the possibilities of a different kind of state—one that,
since it does have the potential for democratic accountability, may be the most likely institution within
which to articulate new visions of global security and less-hierarchical social relations. Although
democratization has not been universally beneficial for women, in certain parts of the world
democratic transitions have been heralded as opening up space for leveraging the state in
women’s interests. Maria Nzomo has reported that, while it is premature to speak of women’s roles in
institutional politics, the 1980s and 1990s in Africa witnessed a phenomenal increase in women’s
associations that were responding to economic, social, and political crises within the region.
Whereas African governments previously discouraged women’s involvement in political activities, it
was with the beginning of political pluralism and liberalization at the end of the 1980s that women’s
movements began to emerge and lobby the state over human rights and gender-sensitive political
agendas.81There are in Africa many women’s groups that do not engage the state directly but that grew up during the era
of democratization. In Tanzania, programs for training, education, and raising the consciousness of women and men on
gender issues were set up after the return of political pluralism. Women have been operating primarily outside the centers of
power: their strategy to influence public decision making has depended on first empowering themselves, using the openings
in political space offered by democratization. However, women are aware that incursions at the formal level of politics does
not mean that women’s issues will be placed on “man-made” agendas. But certain feminists believe that with
democratization and increased opportunities for women in the economy, states are more likely
to create new institutions based on gender equality. April Gordon has claimed that state
intervention is necessary to the promotion of gender equality by breaking down institutionalized
patriarchy and creating new institutions based on gender equity. She has also suggested that the
state cannot achieve gender equality without the improvement of the overall economic development of
society. Clearly, this type of strategy involves a much more interventionist state than liberals
would envisage.82
Feminism in the policy process is effective and can challenge male domination –
political involvement is key.
Paskeviciute, Bilkent University assistant political science professor, and Regan,
Binghamton University political science professor, 2003
[Aida and Patrick, Journal of Peace Research 40.3, “Women’s Access to Politics and Peaceful States”
JSTOR, p.287-92]
A largely unexplored subject in the study of¶ peace research is the unique role played by¶ women in the
use of force by a state. That is,¶ if conventional wisdom and a modicum of¶ empirical evidence that
suggests that women¶ are more 'peaceful' than men are correct, then¶ women's access to political
processes should¶ constrain elite use of force in the international¶ arena. The Guatemalan Mothers of¶ the
Disappeared (GAM), the Greenham¶ Common Movement, and the coalition of¶ Soviet/Russian mothers
with sons fighting in¶ Afghanistan and Chechnya are salient¶ examples of the unique role of women in¶
influencing the amount of state-led violence. A focus on the determinants of constraints on¶ elite use of
militarized force is part of a¶ growing body of literature (for example,¶ Palmer, Regan & London, 2002;
Reiter &¶ Tilman, 2002; Clark, 2000). We build our¶ arguments from a perspective of feminist and¶ gender
studies. Specifically, we draw from a¶ conception of power relationships in gender¶ studies and feminist
theories1 to develop an¶ argument about how the internal distribution¶ of political power at a societal level
(as¶ opposed to a state level) will influence the¶ willingness of the ruling elite to engage in¶ militarized
interstate disputes and war.
We proceed as follows: first we place our discussion in a broader body of literature¶ examining gender
politics and the 'gender gap'¶ in public opinion. Next we present a theoretical¶ framework for thinking
about the¶ unique role of women in the implementation¶ of foreign military policy. Using data on fertility¶
rates, women in the labor force, percent¶ of women in legislatures, and militarized¶ behavior of the state,
we present empirical¶ evidence which points toward access by¶ women to political processes as a viable
explanation¶ for the involvement in disputes and¶ war. Briefly, we show that dyads with low¶ birthratesor with high levels of women in¶ the workforce- are considerably less likely to¶ get involved in or
escalate their militarized¶ disputes, and that this relationship holds even¶ when controlling for the effects
of joint¶ democracy and the levels of economic¶ development. Finally, we discuss the impact of¶ our
research on future scholarship and point¶ to ways in which foreign policy may be altered¶ as a result of
alternative understandings of the¶ constraints on the decision to go to war.
Feminist Scholarship and International Relations
Much of the relevant research on the use of¶ militarized violence observes the critical constraints¶ on
behavior in terms of democracy¶ or the makeup of the ruling coalition (for¶ example, Russett & Oneal,
2001; Ray,¶ 1995). These explanations, we feel, settle too¶ quickly on notions regarding the political¶
power structures within society, framed in¶ terms of regime characteristics, without fully¶ exploring
alternative societal explanations.¶ To some degree our explanatory models are¶ driven by our state-centric
orientation to¶ international politics and the complementary¶ orientation of foreign policy communities.¶
This, however, comes at the cost of a¶ close examination of alternative models and¶ explanations. Feminist
perspectives, for¶ instance, may conceive of the idea behind¶ the diffusion of political power - and there
therefore¶ political constraints - differently from¶ many contemporary models with their focus¶ on the state
as dominant actor.
These types of conceptual opportunities¶ exist under the rubric of gender and feminist¶ scholarship. The
methods and assumptions¶ that underlie the generation of knowledge¶ are often of central concern to
different epistemic¶ communities, in part because they lead¶ to different inferences and interpretations¶
about cause and effect. Critical to many¶ alternative models of state-centric political¶ behavior is the notion
that the accepted¶ theories, the premises behind much of the¶ policy, and the empirical evidence mustered¶
in support of various arguments are in large¶ part a function of the social constructions¶ around which they
were developed. When¶ focusing on issues of war and peace these¶ models generally reflect male social
constructions.¶ Feminist scholarship might¶ suggest, for instance, that when men¶ dominate the field of
study, the general¶ tendency is for the theoretical frameworks¶ used to make sense of the world to be
rooted¶ in masculine conceptions of what works and¶ when. The unique role of women, generally,¶ does
not figure prominently in the models by¶ which our understanding of world politics¶ revolves. In the
norm, the way we conceptualize,¶ operationalize, and test our hunches,¶ therefore, reflects this traditional
masculine¶ view of the discipline. One can infer from¶ this line of reasoning that if these mainstream¶
studies of international interactions¶ could adopt an alternative perspective then¶ the theoretical
frameworks, the operational¶ tests, and the policy implications would¶ differ from contemporary standards
and¶ would more accurately reflect conditions in¶ that referent world. Essentially, it is the social¶
constructions that are driving our research¶ direction, and by extension our results and¶ the policy
recommendations that might¶ derive from them (Unger, 1989).
This type of argument - which is often adopted in feminist scholarship - presents a¶ theoretical challenge
to contemporary¶ models of events in international relations in¶ that the explanatory models may simply¶
reflect a male-dominated subdiscipline.¶ What one group of international relations¶ scholars sees as the
dominant form of power¶ relationships that drive international interactions,¶ another sees as a function of
the¶ common social orientation of those 'doing¶ IR'. One way to frame this is that white men¶ have
constructed a version of the referent¶ world that is deemed important to understanding¶ outcomes in
foreign policy, and¶ they have left out non-white and women's¶ perspectives (Henderson, 1995; Peterson,¶
1992). Scientific research and writing¶ produces the reality that the scholars wish to¶ present, such that the
objects of study are not¶ independent of the researcher (Sismondo,¶ 1996; Peterson, 1992). Empirical
research, it¶ follows, cannot help but fall prey to the¶ social constructions at the heart of the questions¶
asked, the understanding of the causal¶ mechanisms, the methods used to test¶ hypotheses, and the
inferences that result. It¶ presents a challenge to follow some of these¶ leads, which is made easier because
the¶ feminist critique is specific and penetrating,¶ not only focusing on the general notion of¶ social
constructions in determining research¶ agendas but also pointing to an explanation¶ for the uniformity in
mainstream study of¶ international relations. Henderson (1995)¶ presents a similar type of challenge with¶
regard to eurocentric models dominating the¶ study of world politics. This, at its core, is a¶ philosophy of
science issue that challenges us¶ to think more closely about the creative¶ stages of our theoretical
development, and to¶ develop alternative explanations for observable¶ outcomes (McGuire, 1973).
This challenge suggests that knowledge¶ generated without due attention to the¶ breadth of our social
environment is at best¶ incomplete. There are immediate implications for the effect of this skewed
distribution of¶ intellectual influence on the direction of our¶ discipline and the knowledge that it
produces.¶ The implication is that if the perspectives of¶ feminist and gender theories were more
carefully¶ integrated into the discipline, we would¶ know different things about the world of¶
international relations, and presumably we¶ would articulate and implement different¶ policies. We take
these arguments seriously¶ and incorporate them into our models of militarized¶ interstate behavior.
Interstate Conflict and the Role of Women in Society
In this section we develop an argument to¶ advance our understanding of the constraints¶ imposed by
women over the use of force by¶ a state. We do not claim to present a general¶ model of militarized
interstate dispute¶ behavior, but rather a more modest treatment¶ of the role of women's access as a
constraint¶ on state behavior. Specifically, we¶ posit that the greater the role of women in¶ the political
and economic aspects of society,¶ the less likely that the state will engage in¶ militarized interstate
conflict. First, we¶ ground our arguments in the gendered role¶ of women at the societal level. Second, we¶
test a model incorporating the role of fertility¶ rates and political and economic leadership¶ roles as
predictors of militarized state¶ behavior.
When scholars speak of regime type as an¶ explanatory variable they are implicitly referring¶ to the form
of the distribution of power¶ within a society. If power is more diffuse, as¶ in a pluralist society, then the
path to war is¶ impeded by that power structure. When two¶ highly constrained states interact, the
probability¶ of war becomes rather low. The constraints¶ faced by democratic regimes are not¶ directly
observable, but rather we observe a¶ structural characteristic of a country and its¶ subsequent behavior.
Theory links our¶ notion of the source of the constraint to the observed behavior. Gender-specific
formulations¶ of arguments about constraints on¶ state behavior are not common, even though¶ genderspecific attitudes toward the use of¶ force have been demonstrated (see Caprioli¶ & Boyer, 2001).
A recent study by Caprioli (2000)¶ warrants closer attention in our analysis¶ because it employs genderbased indicators¶ to account for state involvement in militarized¶ disputes. We build on this study in an¶
attempt to provide a more theoretically¶ focused explanation and more robust empirical¶ results
accounting for the extent to which¶ women's access to the political sphere of¶ society can be expected to
constrain a state's¶ militarized behavior. In particular, we¶ provide a more completely specified empirical¶
model, tested against all dyads for which¶ data are available. Further, as our indicator of¶ the direct role of
women in politics we use¶ the percentage of women in the lower¶ chamber, rather than the upper chamber¶
used by Caprioli. In most bicameral systems,¶ the lower house is vested with more political¶ power than
the upper house. Thus, we¶ believe our measure captures more fully the¶ extent to which women have
access to¶ political office. Finally, we consider our¶ theoretical treatment to offer a richer explanation¶ for
the observed patterns between¶ women in politics and political outcomes.
We emphasize the importance of fertility¶ rates, which serve as an indicator of women's¶ opportunities to
influence foreign policy¶ decisionmaking at a level of aggregation¶ somewhat divorced from
contemporary¶ indicators of influence. We argue that¶ women's influence at the societal level (with¶ or
without their access to the political sphere¶ at the state level) is important in explaining¶ the occurrence
and escalation of war, and¶ that it has been overlooked in the existing¶ scholarly literature seeking to
provide a¶ systematic explanation of state involvement¶ in militarized disputes. We understand fully¶ the
implicit assumption we make linking¶ access to politics (which we frame in terms¶ of time) to influence
over political decisions.¶ Whether increased access does permit greater¶ influence - or involvement in
grass-roots¶ politics - is an empirical question that can¶ best be answered through further research.¶
However, we believe that at some level¶ political influence is distributed as a function¶ of ability to
participate in the political¶ process. The Grupo Apuyo Matuo (Mothers¶ of the Disappeared) in
Guatemala, the¶ Soldiers Mothers Committee for¶ Soviet/Russian soldiers in Afghanistan and¶ Chechnya,
and the Greenham Common¶ women are strong reminders that grass-roots¶ movements can exert
considerable influence¶ on state policies (see Matloff, 2000).¶ Hierarchical power structures are often¶
found at the heart of feminist critiques of¶ international relations. Some identify the¶ causal mechanism
that determines peace or¶ war as the state-based structure of power in¶ society (Steans, 1998; Peterson,
1992). As¶ women gain greater opportunities to be¶ involved in politics at the community level,¶ less
hierarchical power structures provide¶ more avenues for women to influence¶ political process. Men may
often still make¶ the decision to go to war, but the extent of¶ the constraints they face because of
women's¶ potential involvement in political process¶ can influence when they do so. Women's¶
involvement at the community level can¶ have an important influence on government's¶ decisions to get
involved in military¶ disputes regardless of regime type.
One key to linking women's access to the¶ political process to the likelihood of a state¶ using force is
found in different attitudes¶ held by men and women. If men and¶ women were equally likely to hold
similar¶ preferences over the use of force as a tool of¶ foreign policy, then we would not expect¶
gendered explanations to account for¶ foreign policy behavior. There is a popular conception that women
are generally less¶ violent than men, and less likely to condone¶ war. This popular impression is
supported¶ by public opinion data: men and women¶ differ in their evaluation of the use of force as¶ a
foreign policy instrument, even though¶ there appears to be no gender gap in the attitudes¶ regarding
foreign policy goals (Tessler&¶ Warriner, 1997; Fite, Genest & Wilcox,¶ 1990). This suggests that
although men and¶ women prefer similar outcomes, they hold¶ different preferences over how their
government¶ should get there. In studies of female¶ and male attitudes toward the use of force in¶ the
Gulf War, Gallagher (1993) and Hart &¶ Teeter (1991) both found evidence to¶ demonstrate that women
were less likely¶ than men to condone the use of force against¶ Iraq. There is some indication that this¶
divergence of preferences holds in the¶ current dispute with Iraq, at least in the¶ United States (Morin &
Deane, 2002).¶ Research by Fite, Genest & Wilcox (1990)¶ and Wilcox, Hewitt & Allsop (1996)¶ supports
these results at a more general level.
Several different theoretical frameworks¶ have been offered to account for the gender¶ gap that has been
identified by survey¶ research. First, an ignorance hypothesis¶ suggests that the gender gap in attitudes¶
might originate from the fact that women are¶ less attentive than men to foreign affairs¶ (Wilcox, Hewitt &
Allsop, 1996). Second, a¶ structural explanation points to the fact that¶ on average women are poorer than
men, and,¶ therefore, less inclined to favor military¶ expenditures due to competing claims with¶ the
spending on social welfare (Wilcox,¶ Hewitt & Allsop, 1996; Tessler & Warriner,¶ 1997; Fite, Genest &
Wilcox, 1990). Third,¶ a maternal thesis suggests that the gap might¶ originate from the difference in the
value¶ system between men and women as a result¶ of the socialization process and/or the biological¶
aspects of women's ability to give¶ birth (Wilcox, Hewitt & Allsop, 1996; Fite,¶ Genest & Wilcox, 1990;
Gidengil, 1995).¶ Thus, women might be more caring, empathetic,¶ and cooperative than men. Goldstein¶
(2001) demonstrates that cultural explanations¶ are more compelling than biological¶ ones in terms of
developing an understanding¶ of the role of women in war.2 Although¶ empirical tests generally have not
been able¶ to sort out the competing explanations, they¶ overwhelmingly confirm the notion that¶ women
and men differ with regard to their¶ preferences over the use of force to achieve¶ foreign policy goals
(Togeby, 1994; Gartner,¶ Segura & Wilkening, 1997; Wilcox, Hewitt¶ & Allsop, 1996; Conover & Sapiro,
1993;¶ Cook & Wilcox, 1991; Fite, Genest &¶ Wilcox, 1990; Conover, 1988).
At a societal level, access by women to the¶ political arena can be thought of in terms of¶ time and
involvement in grass-roots activities.¶ As evidenced by women's groups such as¶ the Women in Black in
Israel and Yugoslavia,¶ it is not necessary to be part of the formal¶ political process to exert an influence
on¶ critical government policy. But the ability to¶ hold public demonstrations or to camp out¶ at the
Greenham military base or hold daily¶ demonstrations is in part a function of access¶ to time, time away
from household duties of¶ raising children and managing a home.¶ Grass-roots involvement, moreover,
goes¶ beyond sit-ins and demonstrations to¶ include letter-writing, attending political¶ rallies, and other
forms of political expression.¶ In effect, women become a unique¶ component of the selectorate to which
the¶ ruling elite must be attentive.
Further, if women are less prone to support the use of force to achieve political¶ objectives, then greater
access of women to¶ the political arena should have a systematic¶ effect on political behavior by the state.
In¶ essence, this is arguing that we can partially¶ understand the behavior of the state in terms¶ of the
demographic characteristics of its constituents.¶ However, since the machinery of¶ government is
generally skewed in favor of¶ male participation, the role that women play¶ is possibly more a function of
the extent of¶ their influence in grass-roots politics than in¶ their physical hold on the reins of power.¶
Access, as we use it here, is a function of¶ resources necessary for political activity, primarily¶ the
availability of time, with time¶ serving as a conceptual proxy for a greater¶ interest in and ability to
participate in the¶ general political arena. In traditional¶ societies, this most often involves freedom¶ from
the work associated with child bearing¶ and raising, and the tasks of homemaking¶ associated with them.
When a large proportion¶ of women in a society is involved in the¶ political process, even at a very local
level,¶ women's influence can act as a strong constraint¶ of government behavior. In effect,¶ when
women are powerful in society, the¶ state is increasingly constrained in favor of¶ the policies advocated
by women. Empirical¶ evidence about the attitudes of women¶ would suggest that if two states that find¶
themselves in a militarized dispute have large¶ numbers of women with access to the¶ political process,
then the leaders of the states¶ would be increasingly disposed to find a¶ solution that reflects a less violent
compromise.¶ This argument leads us to our first, and¶ most general, hypotheses:
HI: States with low fertility rates will be¶ less likely to become involved in¶ militarized interstate
disputes.
H2a: Militarized interstate disputes will be¶ less likely between dyads in which¶ both countries have low
fertility rates¶ than when either country has high¶ fertility rates.
H2b: Dyadic disputes between countries¶ with low fertility rates will be less¶ likely to reach a maximum
intensity¶ where serious armed combat and/or¶ fatalities occur.
An alternative formulation of the¶ argument puts the explanation more directly¶ at the point of high-level
political and¶ economic access by women (see Caprioli,¶ 2000; Caprioli & Boyer, 2001). That is, the¶
more women who hold high political office,¶ or the greater the number of women who¶ advance to the
upper echelons of corporate¶ enterprises, the greater the constraints¶ women can exert over political
decisions.¶ This type of argument puts the loci of¶ emphasis on the more traditional form of¶ political
influence and forces the argument¶ about outcomes toward the notion of variation¶ in political ideas or
preferences among¶ the elite rather than the diffusion of influence¶ within society.
***Homophobia***
Frontline – Homophobia
Trends point toward greater equality – progress is slow and steady.
Beauchamp, Think Progress, 12-11-13
[Zack, “5 Reasons Why 2013 Was The Best Year In Human”
http://thinkprogress.org/security/2013/12/11/3036671/2013-certainly-year-human-history/]
Between the brutal civil war in Syria, the government shutdown and all of the deadly dysfunction it represents, the NSA spying revelations, and
massive inequality, it’d be easy to for you to enter 2014 thinking the last year has been an awful one.¶ But you’d be wrong. We have every
reason to believe that 2013
was, in fact, the best year on the planet for humankind.¶ Contrary to what you might have
heard, virtually all of the most important forces that determine what make people’s lives good — the things
that determine how long they live, and whether they live happily and freely — are trending in an extremely happy direction.
While it’s possible that this progress could be reversed by something like runaway climate change, the effects will
have to be dramatic to overcome the extraordinary and growing progress we’ve made in making the
world a better place.¶ Here’s the five big reasons why.¶ 1. Fewer people are dying young, and more are living
longer.¶ India Polio¶ CREDIT: AP PHOTO/MAHESH KUMAR¶ The greatest story in recent human history is the simplest:
we’re winning the fight against death. “There is not a single country in the world where infant or child
mortality today is not lower than it was in 1950,” writes Angus Deaton, a Princeton economist who
works on global health issues.¶ The most up-to-date numbers on global health, the 2013 World Health Organization (WHO)
statistical compendium, confirm Deaton’s estimation. Between 1990 and 2010, the percentage of children who died before their fifth
birthday dropped by almost half. Measles deaths declined by 71 percent, and both tuberculosis and maternal deaths by half again. HIV, that
modern plague, is also being held back, with deaths from AIDS-related illnesses down by 24 percent since 2005.¶ In short, fewer people are
dying untimely deaths. And that’s
not only true in rich countries: life expectancy has gone up between 1990 and
2011 in every WHO income bracket. The gains are even more dramatic if you take the long view: global life expectancy was 47 in
the early 1950s, but had risen to 70 — a 50 percent jump — by 2011. For even more perspective, the average Briton in 1850 — when the British
Empire had reached its apex — was 40. The average person today should expect to live almost twice as long as the average citizen of the
world’s wealthiest and most powerful country in 1850.¶ In real terms, this means millions of fewer dead adults and children a year, millions
fewer people who spend their lives suffering the pains and unfreedoms imposed by illness, and millions more people spending their twilight
years with loved ones. And the trends are all positive — “progress has accelerated in recent years in many countries with the highest rates of
mortality,” as the WHO rather bloodlessly put it.¶ What’s going on? Obviously, it’s fairly complicated, but the
most important drivers
have been technological and political innovation. The Enlightenment-era advances in the scientific
method got people doing high-quality research, which brought us modern medicine and the information
technologies that allow us to spread medical breakthroughs around the world at increasingly faster
rates. Scientific discoveries also fueled the Industrial Revolution and the birth of modern capitalism,
giving us more resources to devote to large-scale application of live-saving technologies. And the global
spread of liberal democracy made governments accountable to citizens, forcing them to attend to their
health needs or pay the electoral price.¶ We’ll see the enormously beneficial impact of these two forces, technology and
democracy, repeatedly throughout this list, which should tell you something about the foundations of human progress. But when talking about
improvements in health, we shouldn’t neglect foreign aid. Nations donating huge amounts of money out of an altruistic interest in the welfare
of foreigners is historically unprecedented, and while not all aid has been helpful, health aid has been a huge boon.¶ Even Deaton, who wrote
one of 2013′s harshest assessments of foreign aid, believes “the case for assistance to fight disease such as HIV/AIDS or smallpox is strong.”
That’s because these programs have demonstrably saved lives — the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), a 2003 program
pushed by President Bush, paid for anti-retroviral treatment for over 5.1 million people in the poor countries hardest-hit by the AIDS epidemic.¶
So we’re
outracing the Four Horseman, extending our lives faster than pestilence, war, famine, and death can take them. That
alone should be enough to say the world is getting better.¶ 2. Fewer people suffer from extreme
poverty, and the world is getting happier.¶ APTOPIX India Maha Kumbh¶ CREDIT: SAURABH DAS/AP PHOTO¶ There are
fewer people in abject penury than at any other point in human history, and middle class people enjoy
their highest standard of living ever. We haven’t come close to solving poverty: a number of African countries in
particular have chronic problems generating growth, a nut foreign aid hasn’t yet cracked. So this
isn’t a call for complacency about
poverty any more than acknowledging victories over disease is an argument against tackling malaria. But make no mistake: as a
whole, the world is much richer in 2013 than it was before.¶ 721 million fewer people lived in extreme
poverty ($1.25 a day) in 2010 than in 1981, according to a new World Bank study from October. That’s
astounding — a decline from 40 to about 14 percent of the world’s population suffering from abject
want. And poverty rates are declining in every national income bracket: even in low income countries, the
percentage of people living in extreme poverty ($1.25 a day in 2005 dollars) a day gone down from 63 in 1981 to 44 in 2010.¶ We can be fairly
confident that these trends are continuing. For one thing, they survived the Great Recession in 2008. For another, the decline in poverty has
been fueled by global economic growth, which looks to be continuing: global GDP grew by 2.3 percent in 2012, a number that’ll rise to 2.9
percent in 2013 according to IMF projections.¶ The bulk of the recent decline in poverty comes form India and China — about 80 percent from
China *alone*. Chinese economic and social reform, a delayed reaction to the mass slaughter and starvation of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, has
been the engine of poverty’s global decline. If you subtract China, there are actually more poor people today than there were in 1981
(population growth trumping the percentage declines in poverty).¶ But we shouldn’t discount China. If what we care about is fewer people
suffering the misery of poverty, then it shouldn’t matter what nation the less-poor people call home. Chinese growth should be celebrated, not
shunted aside.¶ The
poor haven’t been the only people benefitting from global growth. Middle class people
have access to an ever-greater stock of life-improving goods. Televisions and refrigerators, once luxury goods, are now
comparatively cheap and commonplace. That’s why large-percentage improvements in a nation’s GDP appear to correlate strongly with higher
levels of happiness among the nation’s citizens; people like having things that make their lives easier and more worry-free.¶ Global economic
growth in the past five decades has dramatically reduced poverty and made people around the world happier. Once again, we’re better off.¶
3. War is becoming rarer and less deadly.¶ APTOPIX Mideast Libya¶ CREDIT: AP PHOTO/ MANU BRABO¶ Another massive
conflict could overturn the global progress against disease and poverty. But it appears war, too, may be losing its fangs.¶ Steven Pinker’s
2011 book The Better Angels Of Our Nature is the gold standard in this debate. Pinker brought a treasure trove of
data to bear on the question of whether the world has gotten more peaceful, and found that, in the long arc of
human history, both war and other forms of violence (the death penalty, for instance) are on a
centuries-long downward slope.¶ Pinker summarizes his argument here if you don’t own the book. Most eye-popping are
the numbers for the past 50 years; Pinker finds that “the worldwide rate of death from interstate and
civil war combined has juddered downward…from almost 300 per 100,000 world population during
World War II, to almost 30 during the Korean War, to the low teens during the era of the Vietnam War,
to single digits in the 1970s and 1980s, to less than 1 in the twenty-first century.” Here’s what that looks like
graphed:¶ Pinker¶ CREDIT: STEVEN PINKER/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL¶ So it looks like the smallest percentage of humans alive
since World War II, and in all likelihood in human history, are living through the horrors of war. Did 2013 give us any reason
to believe that Pinker and the other scholars who agree with him have been proven wrong?¶ Probably not. The academic debate over the
decline of war really exploded in 2013, but the “declinist” thesis has fared pretty well. Challenges
to Pinker’s conclusion that battle
deaths have gone down over time have not withstood scrutiny. The most compelling critique, a new paper by Bear F. Braumoeller,
argues that if you control for the larger number of countries in the last 50 years, war happens at roughly the same rates as it has historically.¶
There are lots of things you might say about Braumoeller’s argument, and I’ve asked Pinker for his two cents (update: Pinker’s response here).
But most importantly, if battle deaths per 100,000 people really has declined, then his argument doesn’t mean very much. If
(percentagewise) fewer people are dying from war, then what we call “war” now is a lot less deadly than “war” used
to be. Braumoeller suggests population growth and improvements in battle medicine explain the decline, but that’s not convincing: tell me
with a straight face that the only differences in deadliness between World War II, Vietnam, and the wars you see today is that there are more
people and better doctors.¶ There’s a more rigorous way of putting that: today,
we see many more civil wars than we do
wars between nations. The former tend to be less deadly than the latter. That’s why the other major challenge to Pinker’s
thesis in 2013, the deepening of the Syrian civil war, isn’t likely to upset the overall trend. Syria’s war is an unimaginable
tragedy, one responsible for the rare, depressing increase in battle deaths from 2011 to 2012. However, the overall 2011-2012 trend
“fits well with the observed long-term decline in battle deaths,” according to researchers at the
authoritative Uppsala Conflict Data Program, because the uptick is not enough to suggest an overall
change in trend. We should expect something similar when the 2013 numbers are published.¶ Why are smaller and smaller percentages
of people being exposed to the horrors of war? There are lots of reasons one could point to, but two of the biggest ones are the spread of
democracy and humans getting, for lack of a better word, better.¶ That democracies never, or almost never, go to war with each other is not
seriously in dispute: the statistical evidence is ridiculously strong. While some argue that the “democratic peace,” as it’s called, is caused by
things other than democracy itself, there’s
good experimental evidence that democratic leaders and citizens just
don’t want to fight each other.¶ Since 1950, democracy has spread around the world like wildfire. There
were only a handful of democracies after World War II, but that grew to roughly 40 percent of all by the end of the Cold War. Today, a
comfortable majority — about 60 percent — of all states are democracies. This freer world is also a safer one.¶ Second — and this is Pinker’s
preferred explanation — people have developed strategies for dealing with war’s causes and consequences. “Human ingenuity and experience
have gradually been brought to bear,” Pinker writes, “just as they have chipped away at hunger and disease.” A series of human inventions,
things like U.N. peacekeeping operations, which nowadays are very successful at reducing violence, have given us a set of social tools
increasingly well suited to reducing the harm caused by armed conflict.¶ War’s decline isn’t accidental, in other words. It’s by design.¶
4.
Rates of murder and other violent crimes are in free-fall.¶ Britain Unrest¶ CREDIT: AKIRA SUEMORI/AP PHOTOS¶
Pinker’s trend against violence isn’t limited just to war. It seems likes crimes, both of the sort states
commit against their citizens and citizens commit against each other, are also on the decline.¶ Take a few
examples. Slavery, once commonly sanctioned by governments, is illegal everywhere on earth. The use of torture as legal
punishment has gone down dramatically. The European murder rate fell 35-fold from the Middle Ages to
the beginning of the 20th century (check out this amazing 2003 paper from Michael Eisner, who dredged up medieval records to
estimate European homicide rates in the swords-and-chivalry era, if you don’t believe me).¶ The decline has been especially marked in recent
years. Though homicide crime rates climbed back up from their historic lows between the 1970s and 1990s, reversing progress made since the
late 19th century, they have collapsed worldwide in the 21st century. 557,000
people were murdered in 2001 — almost
three times as many as were killed in war that year. In 2008, that number was 289,000, and the
homicide rate has been declining in 75 percent of nations since then.¶ Statistics from around the developed world,
where numbers are particularly reliable, show that it’s not just homicide that’s on the wane: it’s almost all violent
crime. US government numbers show that violent crime in the United States declined from a peak of about 750 crimes per 100,000
Americans to under 450 by 2009. G7 as a whole countries show huge declines in homicide, robbery, and vehicle theft.¶ So even in countries
that aren’t at poor or at war, most people’s lives are getting safer and more secure. Why?¶ We know it’s not incarceration. While the United
States and Britain have dramatically increased their prison populations, others, like Canada, the Netherlands, and Estonia, reduced their
incarceration rates and saw similar declines in violent crime. Same thing state-to-state in the United States; New York imprisoned fewer people
and saw the fastest crime decline in the country.¶ The Economist’s deep dive into the explanations for crime’s collapse provides a few answers.
Globally, police have gotten better at working with communities and targeting areas with the most crime. They’ve also gotten new toys, like
DNA testing, that make it easier to catch criminals.¶ The crack epidemic in the United States and its heroin twin in Europe have both slowed
down dramatically. Rapid gentrification has made inner-city crime harder. And the increasing cheapness of “luxury” goods like iPods and DVD
players has reduced incentives for crime on both the supply and demand sides: stealing a DVD player isn’t as profitable, and it’s easier for a
would-be thief to buy one in the first place.¶ But there’s one explanation The Economist dismissed that strikes me as hugely important: the
abolition of lead gasoline. Kevin
Drum at Mother Jones wrote what’s universally acknowledged to be the
definitive argument for the lead/crime link, and it’s incredibly compelling. We know for a fact that lead
exposure damages people’s brains and can potentially be fatal; that’s why an international campaign to
ban leaded gasoline started around 1970. Today, leaded gasoline is almost unheard of — it’s banned in 175
countries, and there’s been a decline in lead blood levels by about 90 percent.¶ Drum marshals a wealth of evidence that the
parts of the brain damaged by lead are the same ones that check people’s aggressive impulses. Moreover,
the timing matches up: crime shot up in the mid-to-late-20th century as cars spread around the world, and started to decline in the 70s as the
anti-lead campaign was succeeding. Here’s close the relationship is, using data from the United States:¶ Lead_Crime_325¶ Now, non-homicide
violent crime appears to have ticked up in 2012, based on U.S. government surveys of victims of crime, but it’s
very possible that’s
just a blip: the official Department of Justice report says up-front that “the apparent increase in the rate of violent crimes reported to police
from 2011 to 2012 was not statistically significant.Ӧ So we have no reason to believe crime is making a come back, and every reason to believe
the historical decline in criminal violence is here to stay.¶
5. There’s less racism, sexism, and other forms of
discrimination in the world.¶ Nelson Mandela¶ CREDIT: THEANA CALITZ/AP IMAGES¶ Racism, sexism, anti-Semitism,
homophobia, and other forms of discrimination remain, without a doubt, extraordinarily powerful
forces. The statistical and experimental evidence is overwhelming — this irrefutable proof of widespread discrimination against AfricanAmericans, for instance, should put the “racism is dead” fantasy to bed.¶ Yet the need to combat discrimination denial shouldn’t blind us to
the good news. Over the centuries, humanity has made extraordinary progress in taming its hate for and ill-
treatment of other humans on the basis of difference alone. Indeed, it is very likely that we live in the
least discriminatory era in the history of modern civilization. It’s not a huge prize given how bad the past
had been, but there are still gains worth celebrating.¶ Go back 150 years in time and the point should be
obvious. Take four prominent groups in 1860: African-Americans were in chains, European Jews were routinely
massacred in the ghettos and shtetls they were confined to, women around the world were denied the opportunity to work outside the home
and made almost entirely subordinate to their husbands, and LGBT people were invisible. The improvements in each of these group’s statuses
today, both in the United States and internationally, are incontestable. ¶ On closer look, we
have reason to believe the happy
trends are likely to continue. Take racial discrimination. In 2000, Harvard sociologist Lawrence Bobo
penned a comprehensive assessment of the data on racial attitudes in the United States. He found a
“national consensus” on the ideals of racial equality and integration. “A nation once comfortable as a
deliberately segregationist and racially discriminatory society has not only abandoned that view,” Bobo
writes, “but now overtly positively endorses the goals of racial integration and equal treatment. There is
no sign whatsoever of retreat from this ideal, despite events that many thought would call it into
question. The magnitude, steadiness, and breadth of this change should be lost on no one.Ӧ The norm
against overt racism has gone global. In her book on the international anti-apartheid movement in the 1980s, Syracuse’s Audie
Klotz says flatly that “the illegitimacy of white minority rule led to South Africa’s persistent diplomatic, cultural, and economic isolation.” The
belief that racial discrimination could not be tolerated had become so widespread, Klotz argues, that it united the globe — including
governments that had strategic interests in supporting South Africa’s whites — in opposition to apartheid. In 2011, 91 percent of respondents
in a sample of 21 diverse countries said that equal treatment of people of different races or ethnicities was important to them.¶ Racism
obviously survived both American and South African apartheid, albeit in more subtle, insidious forms.
“The death of Jim Crow racism has left us in an uncomfortable place,” Bobo writes, “a state of laissez-faire racism” where racial discrimination
and disparities still exist, but support for the kind of aggressive government policies needed to address them is racially polarized. But
there’s reason to hope that’ll change as well: two massive studies of the political views of younger
Americans by my TP Ideas colleagues, John Halpin and Ruy Teixeira, found that millenials were
significantly more racially tolerant and supportive of government action to address racial disparities
than the generations that preceded them. Though I’m not aware of any similar research of on a global scale, it’s hard not to
imagine they’d find similar results, suggesting that we should have hope that the power of racial prejudice may be waning.¶ The story
about gender discrimination is very similar: after the feminist movement’s enormous victories in the
20th century, structural sexism still shapes the world in profound ways, but the cause of gender equality
is making progress. In 2011, 86 percent of people in a diverse 21 country sample said that equal
treatment on the basis of gender was an important value. The U.N.’s Human Development Report’s
Gender Inequality Index — a comprehensive study of reproductive health, social empowerment, and
labor market equity — saw a 20 percent decline in observable gender inequalities from 1995 to 2011.
IMF data show consistent global declines in wage disparities between genders, labor force participation, and
educational attainment around the world. While enormous inequality remains, 2013 is looking to be the worst year for sexism in history.¶
Finally, we’ve made astonishing progress on sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination —
largely in the past 15 years. At the beginning of 2003, zero Americans lived in marriage equality states;
by the end of 2013, 38 percent of Americans will. Article 13 of the European Community Treaty bans discrimination on the
grounds of sexual orientation, and, in 2011, the UN Human Rights Council passed a resolution committing the council to documenting and
exposing discrimination on orientation or identity grounds around the world. The public
opinion trends are positive
worldwide: all of the major shifts from 2007 to 2013 in Pew’s “acceptance of homosexuality” poll were
towards greater tolerance, and young people everywhere are more open to equality for LGBT individuals than their older peers.¶
best_year_graphics-04¶ Once again, these victories are partial and by no means inevitable. Racism, sexism,
homophobia, and other forms of discrimination aren’t just “going away” on their own. They’re losing
their hold on us because people are working to change other people’s minds and because governments
are passing laws aimed at promoting equality. Positive trends don’t mean the problems are close to
solved, and certainly aren’t excuses for sitting on our hands.¶ That’s true of everything on this list. The fact that fewer people are dying from
war and disease doesn’t lessen the moral imperative to do something about those that are; the fact that people are getting richer and safer in
their homes isn’t an excuse for doing more to address poverty and crime.¶ But too often, the worst parts about the world are treated as
inevitable, the prospect of radical victory over pain and suffering dismissed as utopian fantasy. The overwhelming force of the evidence shows
that to be false. As best we can tell, the reason humanity is getting better is because humans have decided to make the world a better place.
We consciously chose to develop lifesaving medicine and build freer political systems; we’ve passed laws against workplace discrimination and
poisoning children’s minds with lead.¶ So far, these choices have more than paid off. It’s up to us to make sure they continue to.
State-based reforms are critical to mobilization and effectiveness.
Connell, Macquarie University sociology professor, 1990
[RW, Theory and Society, Vol. 19, No. 5, “The State, Gender, and Sexual Politics: Theory and Appraisal”
JSTOR, p.530-2]
5. Because of its power to regulate and its power to create, the state is a¶ major stake in gender politics;
and the exercise of that power is a constant¶ incitement to claim the stake. Thus the state becomes the
focus of¶ interest-group formation and mobilization in sexual politics.
It is worth recalling just how wide the liberal state's activity in relation¶ to gender is. This activity
includes family policy, population policy,¶ labor force and labor market management, housing policy,
regulation¶ of sexual behavior and expression, provision of child care, mass education,¶ taxation and
income redistribution, the creation and use of military¶ forces - and that is not the whole of it. This is not
a sideline; it is a¶ major realm of state policy. Control of the machinery that conducts¶ these activities is a
massive asset in gender politics. In many situations it¶ will be tactically decisive.
The state is therefore a focus for the mobilization of interests that is¶ central to gender politics on the
large scale. Feminism's historical concern¶ with the state, and attempts to capture a share of state power,¶
appear in this light as a necessary response to a historical reality. They¶ are not an error brought on by an
overdose of liberalism or a capitulation¶ to patriarchy. As Franzway puts it, the state is unavoidable for¶
feminism. The question is not whether feminism will deal with the state,¶ but how: on what terms, with
what tactics, toward what goals.5"¶ The same is true of the politics of homosexuality among men. The
earliest¶ attempts to agitate for toleration produced a half-illegal, half-academic¶ mode of organizing that
reached its peak in Weimar Germany,¶ and was smashed by the Nazis. (The Institute of Sexual Science
was¶ vandalized and its library burnt in 1933; later, gay men were sent to¶ concentration camps or shot.) A
long period of lobbying for legal¶ reform followed, punctuated by bouts of state repression.
(Homosexual¶ men were, for instance, targeted in the McCarthyite period in the¶ United States.) The gay
liberation movement changed the methods and¶ expanded the goals to include social revolution, but still
dealt with the¶ state over policing, de-criminalization, and anti-discrimination. Since¶ the early 1970s gay
politics has evolved a complex mixture of confrontation,¶ cooperation, and representation. In some cities,
including San¶ Francisco and Sydney, gay men as such have successfully run for public¶ office. Around
the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, in countries such as the¶ United States and Australia, gay community based
organizations and¶ state health services have entered a close - if often tense - long-term¶ relationship.'
In a longer historical perspective, all these forms of politics are fairly¶ new. Fantasies like Aristophanes's
Lysistrata aside, the open mobilization¶ of groups around demands or programs in sexual politics dates¶
only from the mid-nineteenth century. The politics that characterized¶ other patriarchal gender orders in
history were constructed along other¶ lines, for instance as a politics of kinship, or faction formation in
agricultural¶ villages. It can plausibly be argued that modern patterns resulted¶ from a reconfiguration of
gender politics around the growth of¶ the liberal state. In particular its structure of legitimation through¶
plebiscite or electoral democracy invited the response of popular¶ mobilization.
EXTN – Uniqueness – Homophobia
World is getting better – 2013 was the best year on the planet – every metric goes
[insert side], people are living longer, less people are experiencing war, the world is
richer, and gay marriage is growing and attitudes of acceptance have skyrocketed –
that’s Beauchamp. Prefer it – our ev takes into account their args – their ev cites
snapshots, our cites trends and has recency.
Squo is structurally improving – multiple indicators.
Lomborg, Copenhagen Business School professor, 10-16-13
[Bjorn, “A Better World Is Here” http://www.project-syndicate.org/print/bj-rn-lomborgon-the-decliningcosts-of-global-problems]
For centuries, optimists and pessimists have argued over the state of the world. Pessimists see a world
where more people means less food, where rising demand for resources means depletion and war, and,
in recent decades, where boosting production capacity means more pollution and global warming. One of
the current generation of pessimists’ sacred texts, The Limits to Growth, influences the environmental movement to this day.¶ The
optimists, by contrast, cheerfully claim that everything – human health, living standards, environmental
quality, and so on – is getting better. Their opponents think of them as “cornucopian” economists, placing their faith in the
market to fix any and all problems.¶ But, rather than picking facts and stories to fit some grand narrative of decline
or progress, we should try to compare across all areas of human existence to see if the world really is
doing better or worse. Together with 21 of the world’s top economists, I have tried to do just that,
developing a scorecard spanning 150 years. Across ten areas – including health, education, war, gender,
air pollution, climate change, and biodiversity – the economists all answered the same question: What
was the relative cost of this problem in every year since 1900, all the way to 2013, with predictions to
2050.¶ Using classic economic valuations of everything from lost lives, bad health, and illiteracy to wetlands destruction and increased
hurricane damage from global warming, the economists show how much each problem costs. To estimate the magnitude of the problem, it is
compared to the total resources available to fix it. This gives us the problem’s size as a share of GDP. And the trends since 1900 are sometimes
surprising.¶ Consider
gender inequality. Essentially, we were excluding almost half the world’s population from production. In
1900, only 15% of the global workforce was female. What is the loss from lower female workforce participation? Even
taking into account that someone has to do unpaid housework and the increased costs of female
education, the loss was at least 17% of global GDP in 1900. Today, with higher female participation and
lower wage differentials, the loss is 7% – and projected to fall to 4% by 2050.¶ It will probably come as a big
surprise that climate change is expected to be mostly an increasing net benefit – rising to about 1.5% of GDP per year – in the period from 1900
to 2025. This is because global warming has mixed effects; for moderate warming, the benefits prevail.¶ On one hand, because CO2 works as a
fertilizer, higher levels have been a boon for agriculture, which comprises the biggest positive impact, at 0.8% of GDP. Likewise, moderate
warming prevents more cold deaths than the number of extra heat deaths that it causes. It also reduces demand for heating more than it
increases the costs of cooling, implying a gain of about 0.4% of GDP. On the other hand, warming increases water stress, costing about 0.2% of
GDP, and negatively affects ecosystems like wetlands, at a cost of about 0.1%.¶ As temperatures rise, however, the costs will rise and the
benefits will decline, leading to a dramatic reduction in net benefits. After
the year 2070, global warming will become a net
cost to the world, justifying cost-effective climate action now and in the decades to come.¶ Yet, to put
matters in perspective, the scorecard also shows us that the world’s biggest environmental problem by
far is indoor air pollution. Today, indoor pollution from cooking and heating with bad fuels kills more than three
million people annually, or the equivalent of a loss of 3% of global GDP. But in 1900, the cost was 19% of GDP, and it is expected to
drop to 1% of GDP by 2050.¶ Health indicators worldwide have shown some of the largest improvements.
Human life expectancy barely changed before the late eighteenth century. Yet it is difficult to overstate
the magnitude of the gain since 1900: in that year, life expectancy worldwide was 32 years, compared to
69 now (and a projection of 76 years in 2050).¶ The biggest factor was the fall in infant mortality. For
example, even as late as 1970, only around 5% of infants were vaccinated against measles, tetanus,
whooping cough, diphtheria, and polio. By 2000, it was 85%, saving about three million lives annually –
more, each year, than world peace would have saved in the twentieth century.¶ This success has many parents. The Gates Foundation and the
GAVI Alliance have spent more than $2.5 billion and promised another $10 billion for vaccines. Efforts by the Rotary Club, the World Health
Organization, and many others have reduced polio by 99% worldwide since 1979.¶ In
economic terms, the cost of poor health
at the outset of the twentieth century was an astounding 32% of global GDP. Today, it is down to about
11%, and by 2050 it will be half that.¶ While the optimists are not entirely right (loss of biodiversity in the
twentieth century probably cost about 1% of GDP per year, with some places losing much more), the overall picture is clear. Most
of the topics in the scorecard show improvements of 5-20% of GDP. And the overall trend is even
clearer. Global problems have declined dramatically relative to the resources available to tackle them.¶ Of
course, this does not mean that there are no more problems. Although much smaller, problems in health, education, malnutrition, air pollution,
gender inequality, and trade remain large.¶ But realists
should now embrace the view that the world is doing much
better. Moreover, the scorecard shows us where the substantial challenges remain for a better 2050. We
should guide our future attention not on the basis of the scariest stories or loudest pressure groups, but on objective assessments of where we
can do the most good.
EXTN – Links – Homophobia
Queer theory has limited potential for radical social transformation.
Ruffolo, University of Toronto Ontario Institute for studies in education professor,
2009
[David, “Post Queer Politics” http://books.google.com/books?id=XiLxJgXFScC&q=political+peak#v=snippet&q=political%20peak&f=false, p.1-5]
Queer has reached a political peak. Its theoretical movements have become limited by its incessant
investment in identity politics and its political outlook has in many ways attained dormant status due to its
narrowed interest in heteronormativite. This is, of course, not to suggest the end of queer but instead a potential deterritorialization
of queer as we know it today. Over the past two decades, a significant body of work has contributed to what is referred to as queer studies. Queer
theorizations are at the heart of this anti-canonical genre where the intersection of bodies, identities, and cultures continue to be a central focus.1
Although queer theory informs much of this work vis-à-vis the queering of theory and the theories of
queer, important feminist, postcolonial, and ability theorizations have more recently informed the body of
queer studies. So while I consider queer studies and theories to be interconnected (and at times interchangeable), the theoretical and
philosophical movements of queer studies are certainly not restricted to or by queer theories. What remains consistent amongst
these various theorizations, however, is a shared politics embedded in significations, representations, and
identifications where language has become somewhat of a unified trajectory for thinking through
experience. These important works without question continue to offer many insightful ways to account for the intersection of bodies,
institutions, cultural practices, social traditions, political movements, and economic initiatives. Michael Warner’s introduction of
heteronormativiy in the early 1990s monumentally framed the ways in which we think about how subjects
are subjected to the normative discourses of heterosexuality and in doing so created the important spaces to challenge and
reimagine these productivities.2 As a result of this and many other significant contributions, queer theory has
become almost exclusively interested in challenging heteronormative ideologies by examining and
exposing how subjects come into being through discursive interactions. It offers a critical politics for thinking about
how subjects are constituted through heteronormative discourses. Most notable, perhaps, is bringing to light how subjects
become intelligible through binary identity categories such as male/ female, masculine/feminine, and straight/gay.3 It queers—
disturbs, disrupts, and centers—what is considered “normal” in order to explore possibilities outside of patriarchal, hierarchical, and
heteronormative discursive practices. We see this, for instance, in the works of Butler (1990), Fuss (1995), and Mufloz (1999) as they explore a
shift from identities to (dis)identifications. I outline elsewhere (Ruffolo 2006a) how such readings confront binary identities so as to appreciate
third spaces: fixed and stable identities are reconfigured as mobile and fluid identifications, where the “I” is no longer determined by the Other
but is discursively negotiated through others. Queer
theory critically redefines the relationships amongst bodies,
identities, and culture through a particular commitment to subjectivity as seen through significations,
representations, and identifications. The vigor of queer is its commitment to disrupt ideologies, practices,
concepts, values, and assumptions that are essentially normal in order to expose what is normatively essentialized. Having said this,
what, you might ask, are my post-queer intentions? ¶ In the Fall-Winter 2005 issue of Social Text, David Eng, Judith
Halberstam, and José Esteban Munoz ask a necessary question of queer studies today: “ What’s queer about
queer studies now?” 4 In the introduction, Eng, Halberstam, and Munoz provide an overview of queer that sets a foundation for my
critique of queer: ¶ Around 1990 queer emerged into public consciousness. It was a term that challenged the normalizing mechanisms of state
power to name its sexual subjects: male or female, married or single, heterosexual or homosexual, natural or perverse. Given its commitment to
interrogating the social processes that not only produced and recognized but also normalized and sustained identity, the political promise of the
term resided specifically in its broad critique of multiple social antagonisms, including race, gender, class, nationality, and religion, in addition to
sexuality. (1) ¶ By asking the question “what’s queer about queer studies no” this edition explores the purpose and value of queer in a time of
global economics marked by a post-9/ 11 politics embedded in war and terror. It offers a critical comparison between the “broad social concerns”
of queer studies in the past with the more intensely interconnected focus of queer studies in the present—work interested in “theories of race, on
problems of transnationalism, on conflicts between global capital and labor, on issues of diaspora and immigration, and on questions of
Queer Politics engages Eng, Halberstam, and Munoz’s call for a
“renewed queer studies” by taking into consideration the various interconnections amongst the wide range
of contributors of this edition. It is well known that queer theory is interested in challenging binaries
citizenship, national belonging, and necropolitics” (2). Post-
through an interrogation of heteronormative practices using queer as a verb (a radical process of disruption) rather
than a noun (an umbrella term encompassing multiple identities). My introductory comments on the peaking of queer are
situated in this relationship between queer and heteronormativity. I make the argument here and throughout this book that
the queer/heteronormativity dualism is unproductive considering the contemporary complexities of
neoliberal capitalism and globalization . PostQueer Politics is primarily interested in challenging the
queer/heteronormative dyad that has informed much of the theorizations of queer and the queering of
theories over the past few decades. I consider the “peaking” of queer as a plateau that negotiates contemporary queer theories and
post-queer theorizations. Post-Queer Politics is interested in examining the current politics of queer and the queering of politics through a
renewed sense of queer that is differentiated from queer’s current implications in subjecdvity Its vision is twofold: to consider what something
post might do for queer and what queer might do for something post. I am interested in the doings of post-queer rather than the beings of it so as
to avoid unnecessary binaries that have resulted in the current desire for something post. This project is about the politics around “post-” and
“queer” rather than a post-identitarian landscape that would situate “post-” and “queer” as binaries. ¶ Despite my explicit intention to avoid a
reading of “post-” as a definitive time and space that come after something, I must draw a somewhat stark delineation here: the “post-” of postqueer is in many respects post-subjectivity. I say this not because queer is subjectivity and post-queer is not. This, of course, would produce an
unnecessary binary. Rather, as I will argue in the plateaus that follow, notions
of becoming (Deleuze and Guattari) and dialogism
(Bakhtin) can speak to the creativities and potentialities of contemporary politics that can not be accounted
for in the representations, significations, and identifications inherent to subjectivity. I am therefore not
suggesting that post-queer comes after subjectivity but that it functions within a creative terrain of
potentialities that functions quite differently from subjectivity of which the queer/ heteronormative dyad
is a part of. In other words, the current politics of queer, as seen through its relations to subjectivity, are
limiting for the future of queer studies because of its unequivocal commitment to the
queer/heteronormative binary where the politics of such discourses are restricted by the endless
cycle of significations that reposition subjects on fixed planes—bodies that are either resituated in
predetermined significations (moving from one identity category/ norm to another) or are represented through
differentiated significations (new representations that differ from already emerged significations ). ¶ My use of
bodies extends beyond the ways in which queer theories think about “the body,” embodiment, corporeality, and flesh in terms of subjectivity
where, for instance, movement is often accounted for through resignifications. These readings more often than not limit bodies to physical or
use of “bodies” reaches the virtualities of politics through a
consideration of bodies of theoretical work, bodies of knowledge, institutional bodies, bodies of thought,
systemic bodies, and cultural bodies. I am not so much arguing for the desire to maintain or favor the
terms “body” and “bodies,” but instead to challenge how these terms are read through significations,
representations, and identifications and therefore the overall privileging of subjectivity.
abstract binary representations. Consequently, my
Queer theory depends on heternomativity for its critique – that means it necessarily
reifies heteronormativity.
Ruffolo, University of Toronto Ontario Institute for studies in education professor,
2009
[David, “Post Queer Politics” http://books.google.com/books?id=XiLxJgXFScC&q=political+peak#v=snippet&q=political%20peak&f=false, p.50-5]
Post-queer rhizomatic politics is one that is directed outwards rather than inwards. The continuous flows
of dialogical-becomings--_-the indefinite breaks and connections—are always moving forward where something new
is always created out of something given. Unlike the arborescent-subject that is directed inwards, rhizomatic dialogicalbecomings are always deterritorialized as they maintain an ongoing state of becoming a body without
organs (BwO). The complex flows of desiring-machines described above persistently strive to become a BwO as their connections try to reach
pure deterritorialization. In this section, I want to consider how the BwO is a virtual affect of dialogical-becomings. It does not encapsulate
desiring-machines but is an additional (anti-)production together with desiring-machines. The
BwO is a fundamental aspect of
post- queer politics because it speaks to the production of intensities that emerge when the flows of
desiring-machines stop. Deterritorializations are not finalized states or binary oppositions. They offer an
important strategy for contemporary politics because they do not directly oppose a structure (such as the
queer/ heteronormative dyad) but instead remap a system through creative lines of flight (the plateauing of queer
and post-queer). We can think of the BwO as a limit that continuously seeks to deterritorialize without ever reterritorializing (even though, as you
will see belo reterritorializations are often coupled with deterritorializations). As Brian Massumi writes: ¶ Think
of the body without
organs as the body outside any determinate state, poised for any action in its repertory; this is the body
from the point of view of its potential, or virtuality. Now freeze it as it passes through a threshold state on
the way from one determinate state to another. This is a degree of intensity of the body without organs. It is still the body as
virmality but a lower level of virtuality, because only the potential states involved in the bifurification from the preceding state to the next are
effectively superposed in the threshold state. (1992, 70) ¶ The
BwO is therefore not opposed to desiring-machines but is
instead in a constant tension with them. The term itself—Body without Organs—is not in opposition to the organism. It is against
what the organism stands for: organization. We can think of the subject as such an organization where all meaning refers back to a central core
and all movement corresponds with a central tendency. The
BwO not only challenges the arboreal structures of life but
also works within a different realm as that of the rhizome where it does not break flows (rhizomatic breaks and
connections) but desires continuous flows. Unlike the subject that requires external agencies for meaning such as language structures
or discursive realms, the BwO is pure intensity: ¶ The body without organs is nonproductive; nonetheless it is
produced, at a certain place and a certain time in the connective synthesis, as the identity of producing and
the product: the schizophrenic table is a body without organs. The body without organs is not the proof of an original
nothingness, nor is it what remains of a lost totality. Above all, it is not a projection; it has nothing whatsoever to do with the body itself, or with
an image of the body. It is the body without an image. This imageless, organless body, the nonproductive, exists right there where it is produced,
in the third stage of the binary-linear series. It is perpetually reinserted into the process of production. (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 8) ¶ We
can
think of the BwO as a plane of immanence rather than stratification.’3 It may seem as if desiring-machines and BwO
are a part of two different systems. They are in fact two forms of the same principle: desiring-machines and BwO are both a part of the
productions of productions of life. It is through the tension that they share that every production becomes an anti-production because dialogicalbecomings, for instance, can not maintain a multiplicity of desiring-machines and are unable to fully become a BwO. Dialogical-becomings are
schizo. ¶ Capital is perhaps the most widely referenced example of a BwO. It is the becoming-BwO of capitalism that creates the illusion that
everything is produced through it. Although capital can be transformed into something concrete (i.e., money can purchase goods) it can not do
anything on its own. Capital is a miraculating machine that creates the desire for a BwO to overcome the flows of desiring-machines: the BwO
deterritorializes the organization of capitalism by opting for flows and smooth spaces. The capitalist machine transforms desiring- machines into
BwO by creating the ultimate schizophrenic that “plunges further and further into the realm of deterritorialization, reaching the furthest limits of
the decomposition of the socius on the surface of his own body without organs” (35). The capitalist-schizo becomes the surplus product of
capitalism as it seeks the limits of capitalism itself. Although the BwO is unachievable, it becomes a seemingly preferred state: “You never reach
the Body without Organs, you can’t reach it, you are forever attaining it, it is a limit” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 150). It is not a heightened
awareness of the self, nor is it a fully embodied self. Unlike in significations, representations, and identifications, the BwO is no self at all. In fact,
the BwO is prior to such a subjective capacity The tension between desiring-machines (reterritorializations) and BwO (deterritorializations)
works within a different realm than, say, the subjective limits of identities categories where subjects become intelligible through their associations
with identity norms. Everything for desiring-machines and BwO is pure difference. The intensities involved in such a relationship are before the
coding structures of subjectivity that stratify subjects. It is the abovementioned intensities that make post-queer politics so creative because they
challenge the structured organization of organs and biologically defined bodies. Desiring-machines
and BwO offer a new
language for thinking about life itself without reducing the experiences of such relationships to the
stratification of language. ¶ The creativity of post-queer dialogical-becomings rests in the potential to
deterritorialize stratified structures that limit life to predetermined organizations. Despite the BwO existing prior to
the subjective capacities of, say, psychoanalysis and discursive norms, this certainly does not imply that deterritorializations can not offer
strategies for rethinking life as it is accounted for through representations, significations, and identifications. We
can, for example, think of
the various codings of subjectivity that have permeated identity politics and subsequently the
queer/heteronormative dyad as territorialized stratifications that are in concert with BwO. Stratifications,
or strata, take hold of intensities by territorializing them. For instance, they appropriate the BwO’s flows of pure
difference by organizing dialogical-becomings as subjects of reiterative norms. The strata codes and
territorializes such becomings but the BwO constantly attempts to deterritorialize these territorializations.
Despite queer’s interest in a politics of identity that seeks to consider bodies as mobile and fluid, these
movements can never escape the territorializations of identity norms because they are always in relation
to heteronormative coding and the overall arboreal organization of bodies that are directed
.
inwards Deleuze and Guattari describe three types of strata that help to think through the territorializations of the queer/heteronormative
dyad: the organism, signifiance, and sub jectification. ¶ The surface of the organism, the angle of signiflance and interpretation, and the point of
subjectification or subjection. You
will be organized, you will be an organism, you will articulate your body—
otherwise you’re just depraved. You will be signifier and signified, interpreter and interpreted—otherwise
you’re just a deviant. You will be a subject, nailed down as one, a subject of the enunciation recoiled
into a subject of the statement—otherwise you’re just a tramp. To the strata as a whole, the BwO opposes
disarticulation (or n articulation) as the property of the plane of consistency, experimentation as the operation on that plane (no signifier, never
interpret!), and nomadism as the movement (keep moving, even in place, never stop moving, motionless voyage, desubjectification). (Deleuze
and Guattari 1987, 159) ¶ This
call to dismantle the organism does not imply that we just get rid of the subject or
cut the body from stratification. We recall from above that the BwO and all its intensities comes before
the subject and the organization of the body as an organism and so a politics of becoming calls for a
return to these productive flows of desire: “opening the body to connections that presuppose an entire
assemblage, circuits, conjunctions, levels and thresholds, passages and distributions of intensity, and
territories and deterritorializations measured with the craft of a surveyor” (160). Post-queer dialogicalbecomings seek to deterritorialize the three great strata that territorialize life through significations,
representations, and identifications. This project is but one line of flight that can plateau subjugated sub jectivities. Its intent is to
map various intensities so as to smooth these assemblages by moving towards a plane of immanence. The first step is to identify the strata
involved and then consider the assemblages that constitute such strata. For example, the organism codes an aboreal life by creating various
assemblages that define what it means to be “human”; sigmflance codes meaning through discourse where language has become the primary
means for thinking about experience; and subjectification creates subjects by coding them through social norms. ¶ The
purpose of this is
to locate flows of intensities—not by discovering a BwO but by creating one in the process of
deterritorializing the strata. The queer/heteronormativity dyad has resulted in an arboreal dyad. The
extensions of an arboreal tree go through its central root that supports the whole tree. The
queer/heteronorrnative dyad is such a root where all politics emerge from it. Post-queer rhizomatic
politics, in contrast, do not strictly move or extend from a main root such as the queer/heteronormative
dyad. With that said, dialogical-becomings can engage this binary by plateauing it through its rhizomatic
connections that can spout from any point. The arboreal organization of queer/heteronormativity prohibits
a politics of becoming because movement stops when there is a need to refer back to this dyad. In other words,
the queer/heteronormative dyad halts queer politics when the politics of queer is predominantly concerned
with disrupting heteronormative structures. Post-queer rhizomatic politics is about deterritorializing
politics itself rather than opposing an a priori structure. This project is one line of flight amongst many that can remap
contemporary politics as we know it today. Despite queer’s keen investment in a conceptualization of identity through
mobilities and fluidities, its politics can only go so far because of its arboreal references to
heteronormativity. Let me be clear that I am not demanding an outright rejection of the queer/heteronormative strata for, as we recall
from above, this can result in further territorializations. I am also not suggesting an absolute denunciation of this relationship nor am I disputing
the important developments that queer politics have made. I
am instead calling for the production of different lines of
flight and new assemblages that can smoothen the strata so as to not be limited by structural
organizations.
Queer optimism does not destroy individuals – people are durable and can continue
to create their own meaning for life regardless of any destructive action
Michael Snediker at Mount Holyoke College American Literature Visiting Assistant Professor, 2006,
“Queer Optimism,” Postmodern Culture, Volume 16, Number 3,
Bersani omits British psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott from his catalogue of "great figures of psychoanalytic theory," perhaps, in part, because
Winnicott's theorizations of aggression challenge the intrinsically negative, malfeasant valence of Bersani's primordial destructiveness.
Contrary to Bersani's invocation of "human destructiveness" as commensurate with (if not underwriting) "our
inability to love others," Winnicott argues provocatively and sensitively that destructiveness is itself a condition for
love. Unlike Bersani's consideration of love's destructive tendencies,7 Winnicott's insights are not reducible to theorizations
of masochism insistent upon desire's inextricability from pain. Rather, Winnicott's insights pertain to a sphere more
expansive than that in which desire and masochism so quickly collide. Winnicott writes thus, in his crucial essay, "The
Use of an Object and Relating Through Identifications":
This change (from relating to usage) means that the subject destroys the object. From here it could be argued by an armchair philosopher that
there is therefore no such thing in practice as the use of an object: if the object is external, then the object is destroyed by the subject. Should the
philosopher come out of his chair and sit on the floor with his patient, however, he will find that there is an intermediate position. In other words,
he will find that after "subject relates to object" comes "subject destroys object" (as it becomes external); and then may come "object survives
destruction by the subject." But there may or may not be survival. A new feature thus arrives in the theory of object-relating. The subject says to
the object: "I destroyed you," and the object is there to receive the communication. From now on the subject says: "Hullo object!" "I destroyed
you." "I love you." "You have value for me because of your survival of my destruction of you." "While I am loving you I am all the time
destroying you in (unconscious) fantasy." Here fantasy begins for the individual. The subject can now use the object that has survived. It is
important to note that it is not only that the subject destroys the object because the object is placed outside the area of omnipotent control. It is
equally significant to state this the other way round and to say that it is the destruction of the object that places the object outside the area of the
subject's omnipotent control. In these ways the
object develops its own autonomy and life, and (if it survives)
contributes-in to the subject, according to its own properties. (89-90)
Winnicott's conception of destructiveness amounts to a theory of love (as opposed to desire) to the extent that the
object survives the destructiveness dealt to it. This is to mark within Winnicott's work an interest in and valuation of durability
that is not inapposite to my own. Put more directly, an object's durability as such signals that it is an object, and this
durability is not recognizable to the Winnicottian subject without the fantasy of destroying it. The
destructiveness that an object can withstand, for Winnicott, demonstrates not just the object's own integrity (an
integrity from which the subject might subsequently learn), but its own capacity for loving in spite of feeling damaged or
even repelled by the subject. This form of durability (opposite Butler's flinching congealment) offers an important
psychoanalytic context in which to imagine my own subsequent readings. Winnicott's work seems indispensable both to
future queer engagements with psychoanalysis, and not unrelatedly to particularly psychoanalytically-conceived modes of
optimistic thinking and practice.
The alternative fails, leads to co-option and anti-politics – queer theory should be
rooted in political action and the material world
Edwards, Leicester University, 1998
[Tim, "Queer Fears," Sexualities 1.471]
I have been very hard on queer theory and politics quite deliberately as I have sought to correct what seems to me to be a growing imbalance in
lesbian and gay studies. While the past thirty years have witnessed a quite unprecedented expansion of lesbian
and gay studies alongside an undeniably thriving subculture, many of the underlying problems for lesbian and gay men remain. Little
anti-discriminatory legislation exists in many parts of the western world, let alone elsewhere, and while cultures of
tolerance do increasingly exist there is limited evidence of any widespread change in attitudes. in addition, sexual
minorities arguably have more rather than less problems to contend with, particularly in wake of the
backlash following the AIDS epidemic and various conservative or fundamentalist attempts to undermine the positions of many
sexual minorities - including, most contentiously at present, pedophiles. Perhaps most fundamentally, it is the more academic sense of
unbridled optimism which is cause for most concern. The problems of gay liberation from racism and sexism to
co-option and depoliticization have been extensively documented and it is both puzzling and worrying that,
while still unsolved, these problems have apparently been forgotten in favour of a high level, and often high brow,
cultural critique. I wish to make it quite clear at this point that I am not arguing for a return to the political certainties of the 1970s. What I
am arguing for, though, is a lesbian and gay studies that is far more materially grounded and aware of sexual,
racial, and gendered differentials, to mention only some, than is catered for in a poststructural discourse of so-called 'radical' pluralism of 'beyond'
this or that. The relentless cutting of resources, particularly for qualitative research is perhaps part of the explanation for the wider move towards
textual theorizatin. There are, of course, more positive examples of academic progress: David Evans has provided an enlightening theory of the
state and material construction of sexuality, Lenore Tiefer has provided a refreshing overview of medical discourse and shows awareness of
dimensions of ageing and a new geographyspace is developing which has the potential to transform lesbian and gay ethnography, to name only a
very few. Most significantly of all, though, what is desperately needed is a lesbian and gay studies which is neither an adjunct to post-structural
theory nor merely an outcome of contemporary urban lesbian and gay politics; in short, a scholarly and critical
lesbian and gay
studies founded upon solid empiricism and wide-ranging theories, not some kind of uncritical addendum to
a limited form of cultural optimism.
***Ableism***
Frontline – Ableism
Trends point toward greater equality – progress is slow and steady.
Beauchamp, Think Progress, 12-11-13
[Zack, “5 Reasons Why 2013 Was The Best Year In Human”
http://thinkprogress.org/security/2013/12/11/3036671/2013-certainly-year-human-history/]
Between the brutal civil war in Syria, the government shutdown and all of the deadly dysfunction it represents, the NSA spying revelations, and
massive inequality, it’d be easy to for you to enter 2014 thinking the last year has been an awful one.¶ But you’d be wrong. We have every
reason to believe that 2013
was, in fact, the best year on the planet for humankind.¶ Contrary to what you might have
heard, virtually all of the most important forces that determine what make people’s lives good — the things
that determine how long they live, and whether they live happily and freely — are trending in an extremely happy direction.
While it’s possible that this progress could be reversed by something like runaway climate change, the effects will
have to be dramatic to overcome the extraordinary and growing progress we’ve made in making the
world a better place.¶ Here’s the five big reasons why.¶ 1. Fewer people are dying young, and more are living
longer.¶ India Polio¶ CREDIT: AP PHOTO/MAHESH KUMAR¶ The greatest story in recent human history is the simplest:
we’re winning the fight against death. “There is not a single country in the world where infant or child
mortality today is not lower than it was in 1950,” writes Angus Deaton, a Princeton economist who
works on global health issues.¶ The most up-to-date numbers on global health, the 2013 World Health Organization (WHO)
statistical compendium, confirm Deaton’s estimation. Between 1990 and 2010, the percentage of children who died before their fifth
birthday dropped by almost half. Measles deaths declined by 71 percent, and both tuberculosis and maternal deaths by half again. HIV, that
modern plague, is also being held back, with deaths from AIDS-related illnesses down by 24 percent since 2005.¶ In short, fewer people are
dying untimely deaths. And that’s
not only true in rich countries: life expectancy has gone up between 1990 and
2011 in every WHO income bracket. The gains are even more dramatic if you take the long view: global life expectancy was 47 in
the early 1950s, but had risen to 70 — a 50 percent jump — by 2011. For even more perspective, the average Briton in 1850 — when the British
Empire had reached its apex — was 40. The average person today should expect to live almost twice as long as the average citizen of the
world’s wealthiest and most powerful country in 1850.¶ In real terms, this means millions of fewer dead adults and children a year, millions
fewer people who spend their lives suffering the pains and unfreedoms imposed by illness, and millions more people spending their twilight
years with loved ones. And the trends are all positive — “progress has accelerated in recent years in many countries with the highest rates of
mortality,” as the WHO rather bloodlessly put it.¶ What’s going on? Obviously, it’s fairly complicated, but the
most important drivers
have been technological and political innovation. The Enlightenment-era advances in the scientific
method got people doing high-quality research, which brought us modern medicine and the information
technologies that allow us to spread medical breakthroughs around the world at increasingly faster
rates. Scientific discoveries also fueled the Industrial Revolution and the birth of modern capitalism,
giving us more resources to devote to large-scale application of live-saving technologies. And the global
spread of liberal democracy made governments accountable to citizens, forcing them to attend to their
health needs or pay the electoral price.¶ We’ll see the enormously beneficial impact of these two forces, technology and
democracy, repeatedly throughout this list, which should tell you something about the foundations of human progress. But when talking about
improvements in health, we shouldn’t neglect foreign aid. Nations donating huge amounts of money out of an altruistic interest in the welfare
of foreigners is historically unprecedented, and while not all aid has been helpful, health aid has been a huge boon.¶ Even Deaton, who wrote
one of 2013′s harshest assessments of foreign aid, believes “the case for assistance to fight disease such as HIV/AIDS or smallpox is strong.”
That’s because these programs have demonstrably saved lives — the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), a 2003 program
pushed by President Bush, paid for anti-retroviral treatment for over 5.1 million people in the poor countries hardest-hit by the AIDS epidemic.¶
So we’re
outracing the Four Horseman, extending our lives faster than pestilence, war, famine, and death can take them. That
alone should be enough to say the world is getting better.¶ 2. Fewer people suffer from extreme
poverty, and the world is getting happier.¶ APTOPIX India Maha Kumbh¶ CREDIT: SAURABH DAS/AP PHOTO¶ There are
fewer people in abject penury than at any other point in human history, and middle class people enjoy
their highest standard of living ever. We haven’t come close to solving poverty: a number of African countries in
particular have chronic problems generating growth, a nut foreign aid hasn’t yet cracked. So this
isn’t a call for complacency about
poverty any more than acknowledging victories over disease is an argument against tackling malaria. But make no mistake: as a
whole, the world is much richer in 2013 than it was before.¶ 721 million fewer people lived in extreme
poverty ($1.25 a day) in 2010 than in 1981, according to a new World Bank study from October. That’s
astounding — a decline from 40 to about 14 percent of the world’s population suffering from abject
want. And poverty rates are declining in every national income bracket: even in low income countries, the
percentage of people living in extreme poverty ($1.25 a day in 2005 dollars) a day gone down from 63 in 1981 to 44 in 2010.¶ We can be fairly
confident that these trends are continuing. For one thing, they survived the Great Recession in 2008. For another, the decline in poverty has
been fueled by global economic growth, which looks to be continuing: global GDP grew by 2.3 percent in 2012, a number that’ll rise to 2.9
percent in 2013 according to IMF projections.¶ The bulk of the recent decline in poverty comes form India and China — about 80 percent from
China *alone*. Chinese economic and social reform, a delayed reaction to the mass slaughter and starvation of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, has
been the engine of poverty’s global decline. If you subtract China, there are actually more poor people today than there were in 1981
(population growth trumping the percentage declines in poverty).¶ But we shouldn’t discount China. If what we care about is fewer people
suffering the misery of poverty, then it shouldn’t matter what nation the less-poor people call home. Chinese growth should be celebrated, not
shunted aside.¶ The
poor haven’t been the only people benefitting from global growth. Middle class people
have access to an ever-greater stock of life-improving goods. Televisions and refrigerators, once luxury goods, are now
comparatively cheap and commonplace. That’s why large-percentage improvements in a nation’s GDP appear to correlate strongly with higher
levels of happiness among the nation’s citizens; people like having things that make their lives easier and more worry-free.¶ Global economic
growth in the past five decades has dramatically reduced poverty and made people around the world happier. Once again, we’re better off.¶
3. War is becoming rarer and less deadly.¶ APTOPIX Mideast Libya¶ CREDIT: AP PHOTO/ MANU BRABO¶ Another massive
conflict could overturn the global progress against disease and poverty. But it appears war, too, may be losing its fangs.¶ Steven Pinker’s
2011 book The Better Angels Of Our Nature is the gold standard in this debate. Pinker brought a treasure trove of
data to bear on the question of whether the world has gotten more peaceful, and found that, in the long arc of
human history, both war and other forms of violence (the death penalty, for instance) are on a
centuries-long downward slope.¶ Pinker summarizes his argument here if you don’t own the book. Most eye-popping are
the numbers for the past 50 years; Pinker finds that “the worldwide rate of death from interstate and
civil war combined has juddered downward…from almost 300 per 100,000 world population during
World War II, to almost 30 during the Korean War, to the low teens during the era of the Vietnam War,
to single digits in the 1970s and 1980s, to less than 1 in the twenty-first century.” Here’s what that looks like
graphed:¶ Pinker¶ CREDIT: STEVEN PINKER/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL¶ So it looks like the smallest percentage of humans alive
since World War II, and in all likelihood in human history, are living through the horrors of war. Did 2013 give us any reason
to believe that Pinker and the other scholars who agree with him have been proven wrong?¶ Probably not. The academic debate over the
decline of war really exploded in 2013, but the “declinist” thesis has fared pretty well. Challenges
to Pinker’s conclusion that battle
deaths have gone down over time have not withstood scrutiny. The most compelling critique, a new paper by Bear F. Braumoeller,
argues that if you control for the larger number of countries in the last 50 years, war happens at roughly the same rates as it has historically.¶
There are lots of things you might say about Braumoeller’s argument, and I’ve asked Pinker for his two cents (update: Pinker’s response here).
But most importantly, if battle deaths per 100,000 people really has declined, then his argument doesn’t mean very much. If
(percentagewise) fewer people are dying from war, then what we call “war” now is a lot less deadly than “war” used
to be. Braumoeller suggests population growth and improvements in battle medicine explain the decline, but that’s not convincing: tell me
with a straight face that the only differences in deadliness between World War II, Vietnam, and the wars you see today is that there are more
people and better doctors.¶ There’s a more rigorous way of putting that: today,
we see many more civil wars than we do
wars between nations. The former tend to be less deadly than the latter. That’s why the other major challenge to Pinker’s
thesis in 2013, the deepening of the Syrian civil war, isn’t likely to upset the overall trend. Syria’s war is an unimaginable
tragedy, one responsible for the rare, depressing increase in battle deaths from 2011 to 2012. However, the overall 2011-2012 trend
“fits well with the observed long-term decline in battle deaths,” according to researchers at the
authoritative Uppsala Conflict Data Program, because the uptick is not enough to suggest an overall
change in trend. We should expect something similar when the 2013 numbers are published.¶ Why are smaller and smaller percentages
of people being exposed to the horrors of war? There are lots of reasons one could point to, but two of the biggest ones are the spread of
democracy and humans getting, for lack of a better word, better.¶ That democracies never, or almost never, go to war with each other is not
seriously in dispute: the statistical evidence is ridiculously strong. While some argue that the “democratic peace,” as it’s called, is caused by
things other than democracy itself, there’s
good experimental evidence that democratic leaders and citizens just
don’t want to fight each other.¶ Since 1950, democracy has spread around the world like wildfire. There
were only a handful of democracies after World War II, but that grew to roughly 40 percent of all by the end of the Cold War. Today, a
comfortable majority — about 60 percent — of all states are democracies. This freer world is also a safer one.¶ Second — and this is Pinker’s
preferred explanation — people have developed strategies for dealing with war’s causes and consequences. “Human ingenuity and experience
have gradually been brought to bear,” Pinker writes, “just as they have chipped away at hunger and disease.” A series of human inventions,
things like U.N. peacekeeping operations, which nowadays are very successful at reducing violence, have given us a set of social tools
increasingly well suited to reducing the harm caused by armed conflict.¶ War’s decline isn’t accidental, in other words. It’s by design.¶
4.
Rates of murder and other violent crimes are in free-fall.¶ Britain Unrest¶ CREDIT: AKIRA SUEMORI/AP PHOTOS¶
Pinker’s trend against violence isn’t limited just to war. It seems likes crimes, both of the sort states
commit against their citizens and citizens commit against each other, are also on the decline.¶ Take a few
examples. Slavery, once commonly sanctioned by governments, is illegal everywhere on earth. The use of torture as legal
punishment has gone down dramatically. The European murder rate fell 35-fold from the Middle Ages to
the beginning of the 20th century (check out this amazing 2003 paper from Michael Eisner, who dredged up medieval records to
estimate European homicide rates in the swords-and-chivalry era, if you don’t believe me).¶ The decline has been especially marked in recent
years. Though homicide crime rates climbed back up from their historic lows between the 1970s and 1990s, reversing progress made since the
late 19th century, they have collapsed worldwide in the 21st century. 557,000
people were murdered in 2001 — almost
three times as many as were killed in war that year. In 2008, that number was 289,000, and the
homicide rate has been declining in 75 percent of nations since then.¶ Statistics from around the developed world,
where numbers are particularly reliable, show that it’s not just homicide that’s on the wane: it’s almost all violent
crime. US government numbers show that violent crime in the United States declined from a peak of about 750 crimes per 100,000
Americans to under 450 by 2009. G7 as a whole countries show huge declines in homicide, robbery, and vehicle theft.¶ So even in countries
that aren’t at poor or at war, most people’s lives are getting safer and more secure. Why?¶ We know it’s not incarceration. While the United
States and Britain have dramatically increased their prison populations, others, like Canada, the Netherlands, and Estonia, reduced their
incarceration rates and saw similar declines in violent crime. Same thing state-to-state in the United States; New York imprisoned fewer people
and saw the fastest crime decline in the country.¶ The Economist’s deep dive into the explanations for crime’s collapse provides a few answers.
Globally, police have gotten better at working with communities and targeting areas with the most crime. They’ve also gotten new toys, like
DNA testing, that make it easier to catch criminals.¶ The crack epidemic in the United States and its heroin twin in Europe have both slowed
down dramatically. Rapid gentrification has made inner-city crime harder. And the increasing cheapness of “luxury” goods like iPods and DVD
players has reduced incentives for crime on both the supply and demand sides: stealing a DVD player isn’t as profitable, and it’s easier for a
would-be thief to buy one in the first place.¶ But there’s one explanation The Economist dismissed that strikes me as hugely important: the
abolition of lead gasoline. Kevin
Drum at Mother Jones wrote what’s universally acknowledged to be the
definitive argument for the lead/crime link, and it’s incredibly compelling. We know for a fact that lead
exposure damages people’s brains and can potentially be fatal; that’s why an international campaign to
ban leaded gasoline started around 1970. Today, leaded gasoline is almost unheard of — it’s banned in 175
countries, and there’s been a decline in lead blood levels by about 90 percent.¶ Drum marshals a wealth of evidence that the
parts of the brain damaged by lead are the same ones that check people’s aggressive impulses. Moreover,
the timing matches up: crime shot up in the mid-to-late-20th century as cars spread around the world, and started to decline in the 70s as the
anti-lead campaign was succeeding. Here’s close the relationship is, using data from the United States:¶ Lead_Crime_325¶ Now, non-homicide
violent crime appears to have ticked up in 2012, based on U.S. government surveys of victims of crime, but it’s
very possible that’s
just a blip: the official Department of Justice report says up-front that “the apparent increase in the rate of violent crimes reported to police
from 2011 to 2012 was not statistically significant.Ӧ So we have no reason to believe crime is making a come back, and every reason to believe
the historical decline in criminal violence is here to stay.¶
5. There’s less racism, sexism, and other forms of
discrimination in the world.¶ Nelson Mandela¶ CREDIT: THEANA CALITZ/AP IMAGES¶ Racism, sexism, anti-Semitism,
homophobia, and other forms of discrimination remain, without a doubt, extraordinarily powerful
forces. The statistical and experimental evidence is overwhelming — this irrefutable proof of widespread discrimination against AfricanAmericans, for instance, should put the “racism is dead” fantasy to bed.¶ Yet the need to combat discrimination denial shouldn’t blind us to
the good news. Over the centuries, humanity has made extraordinary progress in taming its hate for and ill-
treatment of other humans on the basis of difference alone. Indeed, it is very likely that we live in the
least discriminatory era in the history of modern civilization. It’s not a huge prize given how bad the past
had been, but there are still gains worth celebrating.¶ Go back 150 years in time and the point should be
obvious. Take four prominent groups in 1860: African-Americans were in chains, European Jews were routinely
massacred in the ghettos and shtetls they were confined to, women around the world were denied the opportunity to work outside the home
and made almost entirely subordinate to their husbands, and LGBT people were invisible. The improvements in each of these group’s statuses
today, both in the United States and internationally, are incontestable.¶ On closer look, we
have reason to believe the happy
trends are likely to continue. Take racial discrimination. In 2000, Harvard sociologist Lawrence Bobo
penned a comprehensive assessment of the data on racial attitudes in the United States. He found a
“national consensus” on the ideals of racial equality and integration. “A nation once comfortable as a
deliberately segregationist and racially discriminatory society has not only abandoned that view,” Bobo
writes, “but now overtly positively endorses the goals of racial integration and equal treatment. There is
no sign whatsoever of retreat from this ideal, despite events that many thought would call it into
question. The magnitude, steadiness, and breadth of this change should be lost on no one.Ӧ The norm
against overt racism has gone global. In her book on the international anti-apartheid movement in the 1980s, Syracuse’s Audie
Klotz says flatly that “the illegitimacy of white minority rule led to South Africa’s persistent diplomatic, cultural, and economic isolation.” The
belief that racial discrimination could not be tolerated had become so widespread, Klotz argues, that it united the globe — including
governments that had strategic interests in supporting South Africa’s whites — in opposition to apartheid. In 2011, 91 percent of respondents
in a sample of 21 diverse countries said that equal treatment of people of different races or ethnicities was important to them.¶ Racism
obviously survived both American and South African apartheid, albeit in more subtle, insidious forms.
“The death of Jim Crow racism has left us in an uncomfortable place,” Bobo writes, “a state of laissez-faire racism” where racial discrimination
and disparities still exist, but support for the kind of aggressive government policies needed to address them is racially polarized. But
there’s reason to hope that’ll change as well: two massive studies of the political views of younger
Americans by my TP Ideas colleagues, John Halpin and Ruy Teixeira, found that millenials were
significantly more racially tolerant and supportive of government action to address racial disparities
than the generations that preceded them. Though I’m not aware of any similar research of on a global scale, it’s hard not to
imagine they’d find similar results, suggesting that we should have hope that the power of racial prejudice may be waning.¶ The story
about gender discrimination is very similar: after the feminist movement’s enormous victories in the
20th century, structural sexism still shapes the world in profound ways, but the cause of gender equality
is making progress. In 2011, 86 percent of people in a diverse 21 country sample said that equal
treatment on the basis of gender was an important value. The U.N.’s Human Development Report’s
Gender Inequality Index — a comprehensive study of reproductive health, social empowerment, and
labor market equity — saw a 20 percent decline in observable gender inequalities from 1995 to 2011.
IMF data show consistent global declines in wage disparities between genders, labor force participation, and
educational attainment around the world. While enormous inequality remains, 2013 is looking to be the worst year for sexism in history.¶
Finally, we’ve made astonishing progress on sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination —
largely in the past 15 years. At the beginning of 2003, zero Americans lived in marriage equality states;
by the end of 2013, 38 percent of Americans will. Article 13 of the European Community Treaty bans discrimination on the
grounds of sexual orientation, and, in 2011, the UN Human Rights Council passed a resolution committing the council to documenting and
exposing discrimination on orientation or identity grounds around the world. The public
opinion trends are positive
worldwide: all of the major shifts from 2007 to 2013 in Pew’s “acceptance of homosexuality” poll were
towards greater tolerance, and young people everywhere are more open to equality for LGBT individuals than their older peers.¶
best_year_graphics-04¶ Once again, these victories are partial and by no means inevitable. Racism, sexism,
homophobia, and other forms of discrimination aren’t just “going away” on their own. They’re losing
their hold on us because people are working to change other people’s minds and because governments
are passing laws aimed at promoting equality. Positive trends don’t mean the problems are close to
solved, and certainly aren’t excuses for sitting on our hands.¶ That’s true of everything on this list. The fact that fewer people are dying from
war and disease doesn’t lessen the moral imperative to do something about those that are; the fact that people are getting richer and safer in
their homes isn’t an excuse for doing more to address poverty and crime.¶ But too often, the worst parts about the world are treated as
inevitable, the prospect of radical victory over pain and suffering dismissed as utopian fantasy. The overwhelming force of the evidence shows
that to be false. As best we can tell, the reason humanity is getting better is because humans have decided to make the world a better place.
We consciously chose to develop lifesaving medicine and build freer political systems; we’ve passed laws against workplace discrimination and
poisoning children’s minds with lead.¶ So far, these choices have more than paid off. It’s up to us to make sure they continue to.
Socio-economic conditions for people with disabilities are improving – the law is
critical to sustaining improvements in access.
Kanter, Syracuse University law professor, 2011
[Arlene, Syracuse Disability and Law program founder and director, “THE LAW: WHAT’S
DISABILITY STUDIES GOT TO DO WITH IT OR AN INTRODUCTION TO DISABILITY LEGAL”
http://www3.law.columbia.edu/hrlr/hrlr_journal/42.2/Kanter.pdf, p.446-9]
As I will explain below, to the extent that law reflects¶ society’s norms, values, and intolerances, it is an
arbiter of power¶ relations. As such, law itself can become part of the problem by¶ creating social barriers
and classifications based on competency or¶ abilities. As Jones and Marks have observed, “even very
many well¶ intentioned protective laws may undermine the rights of people with¶ disabilities.”141
However, they also admit that “law is an important¶ tool . . . [whose] educative and symbolic value is
not to be¶ underestimated.” 142 Just as the law can create social barriers by¶ creating classifications based
on competency or abilities, therefore, it¶ can also foster equality and inclusion. Stated differently, law can
be a¶ source of social change through the enactment and implementation of¶ progressive laws and
inclusive interpretation of laws by attorneys¶ and the courts. The law can inform Disability Studies with
respect to¶ how a given society includes or excludes people with disabilities. It¶ provides a framework
with which to assess the infusion of Disability¶ Studies values into society. Disability Legal Studies
provides the¶ tools to explore such regenerative aspects of law.143
Within law, a shift has already begun to take place from the¶ traditional doctrinal analysis forbidding
discrimination on the basis¶ of disability 144 to a more textured understanding of people with¶ disabilities
as a minority group and growing attention to disability as¶ a social construct. 145 But even within this
understanding, law is¶ perceived as an instrument for social change through established¶ mechanisms,
such as statutes and court decisions. The law is still¶ viewed “as separate from society, [and] as a
reflection of social¶ relations and cultural meanings.” 146 A Disability Legal Studies¶ analysis would ask
instead how and in what ways the law has¶ participated in forming those hierarchies and how they are
related to¶ the overall exclusion and marginalization of people with¶ disabilities.147 If we were then to
examine law through the Disability¶ Legal Studies lens, the emphasis would be on how people with¶
disabilities are excluded within the law, and how inclusion may¶ occur. As Colin Barnes, Geof Mercer,
and Tom Shakespeare have¶ written,
While the voice of disabled people and their¶ organizations is being heard more often and more¶
distinctly than before, the struggle for improved socioeconomic¶ conditions, for a better quality of life,
and¶ for citizenship rights generally goes on. Recent policy¶ debates ranging across welfare benefits and
services¶ to abortion and euthanasia have increased the¶ suspicions of disabled people. There is generally
a¶ much-changed political rhetoric responding to¶ disabled people’s claims, and in considering research¶
evidence and making policy proposals, but promised¶ improvements all too often fail to materialize.148
From a practical view, it is true. Most people with disabilities¶ believe that things have not gotten much
better for them over the¶ past twenty years, even with the enactment of the Americans with¶ Disabilities
Act.149 Why is this so? What are the root causes of these¶ problems? And most importantly, what can we
do to alter this¶ situation? Such questions are (or should be) central to the study of¶ law. These questions
raise important issues regarding the concepts of¶ justice, power, equality, and liberty. Indeed, the
relationship between¶ citizen and society is essential to legal education, although different¶ law schools
give priority to different subject areas or skills.
In most law schools today, there are some courses that focus¶ primarily on law that affects the daily lives
of all people, including¶ criminal and civil law. Other courses focus on fundamental legal¶ concepts and
principles, including those principles’ origin and¶ contemporary influence and impact. Other courses stress
the¶ application of legal principles and skills in specific real-world situations, through clinics and
externship experiences. And other law¶ schools highlight courses that examine law as an institution that¶
provides its government with power and authority that can bring¶ both order and the risk of abuse, as well
as the relationship between¶ power and law, as was the focus of the critical legal studies¶ movement. In so
doing, legal education has the potential to¶ understand how law can and has promoted inclusion, social
cohesion,¶ and social change. Disability Legal Studies is relevant to our law¶ school curriculum and the
legal academy in general for the following¶ reasons.150
EXTN – Uniqueness – Ableism
World is getting better – 2013 was the best year on the planet – every metric goes
[insert side], people are living longer, less people are experiencing war, the world is
richer and discrimination is decreasing because mindsets of acceptance are growing
– that’s Beauchamp. Prefer it – our ev takes into account their args – their ev cites
snapshots, our cites trends and has recency.
Squo is structurally improving – multiple indicators.
Lomborg, Copenhagen Business School professor, 10-16-13
[Bjorn, “A Better World Is Here” http://www.project-syndicate.org/print/bj-rn-lomborgon-the-decliningcosts-of-global-problems]
For centuries, optimists and pessimists have argued over the state of the world. Pessimists see a world
where more people means less food, where rising demand for resources means depletion and war, and,
in recent decades, where boosting production capacity means more pollution and global warming. One of
the current generation of pessimists’ sacred texts, The Limits to Growth, influences the environmental movement to this day.¶ The
optimists, by contrast, cheerfully claim that everything – human health, living standards, environmental
quality, and so on – is getting better. Their opponents think of them as “cornucopian” economists, placing their faith in the
market to fix any and all problems.¶ But, rather than picking facts and stories to fit some grand narrative of decline
or progress, we should try to compare across all areas of human existence to see if the world really is
doing better or worse. Together with 21 of the world’s top economists, I have tried to do just that,
developing a scorecard spanning 150 years. Across ten areas – including health, education, war, gender,
air pollution, climate change, and biodiversity – the economists all answered the same question: What
was the relative cost of this problem in every year since 1900, all the way to 2013, with predictions to
2050.¶ Using classic economic valuations of everything from lost lives, bad health, and illiteracy to wetlands destruction and increased
hurricane damage from global warming, the economists show how much each problem costs. To estimate the magnitude of the problem, it is
compared to the total resources available to fix it. This gives us the problem’s size as a share of GDP. And the trends since 1900 are sometimes
surprising.¶ Consider
gender inequality. Essentially, we were excluding almost half the world’s population from production. In
1900, only 15% of the global workforce was female. What is the loss from lower female workforce participation? Even
taking into account that someone has to do unpaid housework and the increased costs of female
education, the loss was at least 17% of global GDP in 1900. Today, with higher female participation and
lower wage differentials, the loss is 7% – and projected to fall to 4% by 2050.¶ It will probably come as a big
surprise that climate change is expected to be mostly an increasing net benefit – rising to about 1.5% of GDP per year – in the period from 1900
to 2025. This is because global warming has mixed effects; for moderate warming, the benefits prevail.¶ On one hand, because CO2 works as a
fertilizer, higher levels have been a boon for agriculture, which comprises the biggest positive impact, at 0.8% of GDP. Likewise, moderate
warming prevents more cold deaths than the number of extra heat deaths that it causes. It also reduces demand for heating more than it
increases the costs of cooling, implying a gain of about 0.4% of GDP. On the other hand, warming increases water stress, costing about 0.2% of
GDP, and negatively affects ecosystems like wetlands, at a cost of about 0.1%.¶ As temperatures rise, however, the costs will rise and the
benefits will decline, leading to a dramatic reduction in net benefits. After
the year 2070, global warming will become a net
cost to the world, justifying cost-effective climate action now and in the decades to come.¶ Yet, to put
matters in perspective, the scorecard also shows us that the world’s biggest environmental problem by
far is indoor air pollution. Today, indoor pollution from cooking and heating with bad fuels kills more than three
million people annually, or the equivalent of a loss of 3% of global GDP. But in 1900, the cost was 19% of GDP, and it is expected to
drop to 1% of GDP by 2050.¶ Health indicators worldwide have shown some of the largest improvements.
Human life expectancy barely changed before the late eighteenth century. Yet it is difficult to overstate
the magnitude of the gain since 1900: in that year, life expectancy worldwide was 32 years, compared to
69 now (and a projection of 76 years in 2050).¶ The biggest factor was the fall in infant mortality. For
example, even as late as 1970, only around 5% of infants were vaccinated against measles, tetanus,
whooping cough, diphtheria, and polio. By 2000, it was 85%, saving about three million lives annually –
more, each year, than world peace would have saved in the twentieth century.¶ This success has many parents. The Gates Foundation and the
GAVI Alliance have spent more than $2.5 billion and promised another $10 billion for vaccines. Efforts by the Rotary Club, the World Health
Organization, and many others have reduced polio by 99% worldwide since 1979.¶ In
economic terms, the cost of poor health
at the outset of the twentieth century was an astounding 32% of global GDP. Today, it is down to about
11%, and by 2050 it will be half that.¶ While the optimists are not entirely right (loss of biodiversity in the
twentieth century probably cost about 1% of GDP per year, with some places losing much more), the overall picture is clear. Most
of the topics in the scorecard show improvements of 5-20% of GDP. And the overall trend is even
clearer. Global problems have declined dramatically relative to the resources available to tackle them.¶ Of
course, this does not mean that there are no more problems. Although much smaller, problems in health, education, malnutrition, air pollution,
gender inequality, and trade remain large.¶ But realists
should now embrace the view that the world is doing much
better. Moreover, the scorecard shows us where the substantial challenges remain for a better 2050. We
should guide our future attention not on the basis of the scariest stories or loudest pressure groups, but on objective assessments of where we
can do the most good.
EXTN – Links – Ableism
Legal reform is key.
Kanter, Syracuse University law professor, 2011
[Arlene, Syracuse Disability and Law program founder and director, “THE LAW: WHAT’S
DISABILITY STUDIES GOT TO DO WITH IT OR AN INTRODUCTION TO DISABILITY LEGAL”
http://www3.law.columbia.edu/hrlr/hrlr_journal/42.2/Kanter.pdf, p.461-2]
In addition to Supreme Court jurisprudence, other aspects of¶ our legal system are deeply entwined in
disability issues. From the¶ guardian laws which afford the courts power to decide who is and is¶ not
competent to make decisions about their own lives, to the¶ insanity defense which involves an inquiry into
whether an¶ individual is culpable or exonerated based on what experts tell the¶ court about the person’s
state of mind, to the best interest of the¶ child, which is used by courts as the standard by which to judge¶
custody decisions (and, depending on the judge’s knowledge about¶ disability, could result in termination
of rights based on a parent’s¶ disability), or to insurance laws which offer different levels of¶ coverage for
treatment of physical or mental impairments—disability¶ is embedded with social and cultural meanings
within our legal¶ system. As one disability rights advocate has observed,
As advocates, we deal every day with the ways in¶ which legal power is used against individuals with¶
disabilities, so the idea that disability bias is¶ embedded in the structure of law is built into how we¶ do our
jobs. We see how rigid conceptions of¶ competency are manipulated to deny people with¶ disabilities
control over their property, their living¶ arrangements, and their bodies. We have learned that¶ core values
of individual autonomy, equality, and due¶ process are left behind by “treatment” models and¶ paternalism.
We no longer question, though we each¶ might express the point differently, that the law¶ proceeds as if
there were an identifiable standard of¶ “ableness” that describes most of us, and justifies different
treatment of everyone else, and that such a¶ standard is myth.198
Disability Studies provides a vehicle with which to explore¶ questions about the rights and
responsibilities of citizens and the¶ general role of the government in promoting and protecting the¶
welfare of all citizens. Just as discussions of gender and race have¶ had an impact well beyond women
and people of color, so too can¶ disability force the legal academy to reconsider the economic, social,¶
political, cultural, religious, legal, philosophical, artistic, moral,¶ creative and medical aspects of almost
everything “we have taken for¶ granted.”199
Law key.
Mor, Tel Aviv University LLB, 2006
[Sagit, Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities: Vol. 18: Iss. 1, Article 3, “Between Charity, Welfare, and
Warfare: A Disability Legal Studies Analysis of Privilege and Neglect in Israeli Disability Policy”
http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1309&context=yjlh, p.71]
The move to the social and the political also implicates the law in¶ various ways. Focusing on the place of
law in that scheme of power¶ exposes ableism as a legalized system: a system of stated and unstated¶
norms that have been codified into legal arrangements, whether by¶ addressing people with disabilities or
by ignoring them. Consequently, the¶ profound and distinctive power of law to generate disablement, to
exclude,¶ and to confine, by defining rights, entitlements, and duties, is revealed. By¶ legalizing ableism
the law becomes constitutive of disability in itself. At¶ the same time, that shift can also lead to a greater
explicit mobilization of¶ the law to redress the wrongs of the past, to become an apparatus of¶ change, a
source of hope, and a tool in reconstructing society.27
Law good.
Mor, Tel Aviv University LLB, 2006
[Sagit, Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities: Vol. 18: Iss. 1, Article 3, “Between Charity, Welfare, and
Warfare: A Disability Legal Studies Analysis of Privilege and Neglect in Israeli Disability Policy”
http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1309&context=yjlh, p.137]
The turn from viewing disability as the problem, to analyzing ableism¶ and the power relations within
which disability is constituted,¶ characterizes the disability rights era. Yet the shift to rights carries the
risk¶ of neglecting welfare. Thus, disability rights advocates tend to be¶ conflicted about, if not entirely
opposed to, disability allowances policies,¶ arguing that these policies reinforce the marginality of people
with¶ disabilities.338 Nonetheless, the reality of poverty and unaccommodated¶ workplaces as well as the
realization that welfare law is a major site of¶ production of meaning calls for critical engagement with
those issues. The¶ meaning of disability cannot be transformed without transforming the¶ structure of
welfare.
Strong social institutions are key.
Skrtic, University of Kansas special education professor, and Kent, University of
Kansas postdoctoral sponsor, 2013
[Thomas and J Robert, within the book Righting Educational Wrongs: Disability Studies in Law and
Education, “Rights, Needs, and Capabilities: Institutional and Political Barriers to Justice for Disabled
People”
http://books.google.com/books?id=hoKiAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA24&lpg=PA24&dq=%22disability+legal+st
udies%22&source=bl&ots=9wXA79Nt3Z&sig=tWTw8sKSg9me9Kz-sDHnA6OUy8&hl=en&sa=X&ei=F0HxUuznBOeysQSokICgBA&ved=0CJsBEOgBMAk#v=onepage&q=kent&f=fa
lse, p.100-2]
An institutional theory of justice inclusive of the imperatives of economic redistribution, appropriate
forms of recognition and representation, and a deliberative model of democracy is a recipe for social
democracy.34 Although such a theory is anathema to market liberals early and late, managerial liberals
can be and developmental liberals generally are social democrats. As such, both strains embrace an
egalitarian conception of positive liberty entailing notions of social and economic rights. Despite a
common embrace of social democracy however, the difference between managerial liberalism and
developmental liberalism are insurmountable with respect to the aim and scope of democracy , wherein
the aggregative model is definitive of the former, as noted, and a robust form of deliberative democracy is
definitive of the latter (Hanson 1985, 80-86). For managerial liberals, democracy is a procedural method
of preventing tyranny through periodic elections, but for developmental liberals democracy is a way of
life that requires the cultivation of skills, habits, judgment, and other traits of character necessary for
constructive participation in all spheres of society. For John Dewey – the quintessential developmental
liberal with roots in the same neo-Aristotelianism that underwrites Nussbaum’s capabilities approach –
democracy so construed was linked to a belief in equal opportunities for self-development or self-
realization “independent of the quantity or range of [an individual’s] personal endowment” ([1939]
1991a, 226). Early managerial liberals doubted the political wisdom of citizens and sought to minimize
their influence, placing their faith instead in bureaucracy and technical expertise. But Dewey ([1927]
1988, 351-72) and fellow developmental liberal progressives Jane Addams (1902) and Herbert Croly
([1909] 1965) sought to create deliberative institutional conditions – including non-bureaucratic,
collaborative, problem-solving organizations – for an informed, self-conscious, inclusive, and
participatory public to work in partnership with government facilitated by a new breed of socially
committed and community-oriented professionals (Sullivan 2005, 99-115, 179-87). This type of “civic”
(Sullivan 2005, 185) or “democratic” (Dzur 2008, 101) professionalism is premised on the cultural
sensibility of the strong democrat, the practical reasoning of pragmatism, and the traditional idea of a
profession as a calling, the developmental liberal progressives saw it as a way to restore a sense of
collective social purpose in the professions, one based on recognition of the profession’s responsibility to
the community and especially to the most negatively affected by social inequities.35
However, the principal difference that sets developmental liberalism apart from the other two strains of
liberalism lies in the ideal of self-development, of human flourishing, in diverse contexts of work, leisure,
and citizenship, which is what makes developmental liberalism – or what Dewey alternately called
“renascent,” “radical,” or “democratic” liberalism ([1935] 1991b, 41, 45, 64) – and its strong, deliberative
model of democracy an ideal political grounding for the capabilities approach to justice.36 Paraphrasing
Aristotle, Nussbaum writes, “W]hat all citizens must have is some sort of deliberative and judicial
functioning, [recognizing that]…concrete institutional realization of this varies with the city” (1988, 178,
emphasis in original). What is missing from her capabilities approach in this regard is consideration of the
scope of democratic citizenship and how the political practice of citizens so construed might be
institutionalized in a just modern society. What justice requires for disabled people, we believe, is this
kind of society: a strong, deliberative democracy with participatory social institutions and civic
professionals committed to realizing the developmental liberal ideal of human flourishing for one and all.
Institutions can be carriers of injustice or cultivators of justice – if they fail it is
because of a lack of engagement.
Skrtic, University of Kansas special education professor, and Kent, University of
Kansas postdoctoral sponsor, 2013
[Thomas and J Robert, within the book Righting Educational Wrongs: Disability Studies in Law and
Education, “Rights, Needs, and Capabilities: Institutional and Political Barriers to Justice for Disabled
People”
http://books.google.com/books?id=hoKiAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA24&lpg=PA24&dq=%22disability+legal+st
udies%22&source=bl&ots=9wXA79Nt3Z&sig=tWTw8sKSg9me9Kz-sDHnA6OUy8&hl=en&sa=X&ei=F0HxUuznBOeysQSokICgBA&ved=0CJsBEOgBMAk#v=onepage&q=kent&f=fa
lse, p.84-7]
Rights, Needs, and Relationships
These design and implementation problems constitute a disjunction between the rights conferred by the
IDEA and their realization; they are injustices that the statute either has not been able to overcome or has
perpetuated or created. Nussbaum’s claim that the IDEA gives disables children enforceable rights to an
appropriate individualized education (2006a, 203) is true only in a formal sense; the rights conferred by
the statute are not fully realized in the institutional context that it seeks to change. Such disjunctions are a
central concern in the critique of liberal legal consciousness, the framework that underwrites the IDEA
and other disability and civil rights legislation, which holds that legal rights discourse or “rights talk,” as a
political strategy, is both indeterminate and legitimating. It is indeterminate because the value of a right in
eliminating injustice is determined by the structure and political commitments of its institutional context,
not by the right itself. Rights talk is legitimating because by appearing to confer rights in such contexts, it
legitimates the injustice it seeks to eliminate, in effect legitimating the continued exercise of political
power over the disempowered (Crenshaw 1988, 1351-54; Kelman 1987, 262-68). In response to this
“postrights” critique, however, legal scholars of color defend rights talk as a political strategy, both
crediting it for rights achieved in the civil rights movement and, with the recognition of the idioms
indeterminate and legitimating effects, calling for a “jurisprudence of reconstruction” (A. Harris 1994,
755) to fully actualize those rights by reconstructing them to reflect the real needs and political
commitments of communities of color (Crenshaw 1988, 1349-69; Williams, 146-65).
The disability rights movement20 today is in a position similar to that of the broader civil rights
movement. It has used the rights idiom successfully to establish disability rights in law, but the material
realization of those rights is at best indeterminate, institutionally mediated, and disempowering, especially
for individuals and families subject to the intersecting oppressions of race/ethnicity, class, gender,
language, and disability (Connor 2008, 42-51; McCall and Skrtic 2009). In terms of a direction for
remedial action, the one proposed by civil rights scholars makes sense as far as it goes; that is, current
indeterminate and legitimating disability rights must be reconstructed to reflect the disability
community’s real needs and political commitments. The advantage of the capabilities approach in this
regard is that, as a model of social justice, it replaces the contractarian sense of justice with values such as
human dignity, case, inclusion, and human flourishing, all backed by a set of morally and politically
entitled capabilities.21 However, reconstructing disability rights to reflect the disability community’s real
needs and political commitments requires more than a jurisprudence of reconstruction that establishes
human capabilities as fundamental entitlements. It also requires overcoming two additional problems, a
theoretical problem that we discuss in the next paragraph and a political problem addressed in the
concluding section.
The theoretical problem is the one illustrated in our analysis of the IDEA: the need to theorize the
institutional context in which reconstructed rights and capabilities needs-claims are adjudicated. Although
Nussbaum recognizes that institutions are crucially important in implementing capabilities, she admits
that her account of the capabilities approach “does not say enough about [them]” (2006b, 502).22
Moreover, it is not enough merely to recognize the role of institutions in creating just conditions for the
cultivation of capabilities. As illustrated in the analyses of how institutionalized organizations can
obstruct capability cultivation and produce unjust outcomes with relative impunity. The question for us is
what a more complete theory of justice – one that puts institutional analysis in the foreground – would
entail. Beyond recognizing that institutions can be carriers of injustice or, appropriately transformed,
instruments of social justice, such a theory requires clarity about what injustice entails and how it is
sustained. Although Nussbaum has dealt minimally with this topic, political philosophers Iris Marion
Young (1990) and Nancy Fraser (1989a, 2008) as well as legal scholar Martha Minow (1990) have done
exemplary scholarship on it.
[Tom note- IDEA = Individuals with Disabilities Education Act]
Micro-political focus specifically flawed in the disability context.
Davis, University of Illinois Chicago English professor, 2007
[Lennard, “Shelley Tremain, ed. Foucaultand the Government of Disability”
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Shelley+Tremain,+ed.%3A+Foucault+and+the+Government+of+Disabilit
y.-a0191857257]
The first thing to say about Foucault and the Government of Disability is that it is the best book on disability and Foucault ever done. The second
thing to say is that it is also the only book on Foucault and disability. So the question arises, why did it take so long to see a significant volume
linking this thinker with this identity category? Shelley Tremain, for her part, has written on Foucault for a long time, but her influence is only
now being felt. So this book, collecting many excellent essays on governmentality, institutions, sexuality, and so on, is a welcome addition to the
intellectual life of disability studies. With it, we may well hope, Foucault's insights will find a more direct appeal to those who are involved in
disability studies. ¶ To explain the relative absence of Foucault, we might want to consider that disability
studies has basically been
an Anglo-American endeavour, which is just beginning to expand its insights into the globalized world.
As an Anglo-American endeavour, it has for the most part eschewed continental philosophy and cultural
criticism. The works of Merleau-Ponty Levinas, Foucault, Derrida, Agamben, and others have composed a rather small rivulet in the torrent of
positivist, quantitative, and qualitative work done first in the realm of sociology, political science, and legal studies--and then in the cultural and
humanistic extensions of the enterprise. It is true that the British school has focused on continental philosophy but only to the extent that it
included Marx, Engels, Gramsci, and other socialist writers and thinkers, all of whom were again largely in the positivist mode. ¶ Foucault
presents us with an interesting example of a continental thinker whose work is a blend of metaphysics and data. The fact that Foucault himself
rarely engaged with Derrida or any of his philosophical confreres illuminates his positivist side, but at other moments he does seem very much a
part of the poststructuralist enterprise. His use of the archive links him with historians, but his analysis of the archive brings him into a broader
area of philosophy, sociology, the history of ideas, and the like. ¶ While it is rare to see Foucault entirely excluded from discussions of the body in
the newer phase of disability studies, his appearance is often largely a token one. Foucault's main insights about the clinical gaze, madness, the
panopticon, docile bodies, and so on are used as touchstones, but his larger theory and its implications are usually left behind. The reason for this,
which becomes fairly obvious in reading Tremain's collection, is that the
application of Foucault qua Foucault to disability is
not one that will yield obviously libratory solutions to onerous social and political problems. In fact, Foucault,
in his full-strength, undiluted form is powerful medicine verging on poison. There is no feel-good, uplifting message to be distilled from the bitter
dose of analysis that Foucault offers. There is no safe place to hide from the klieg lights of his scrutiny of institutions and practices that make up
modernity. So inviting Foucauldeans to a party is like bringing an annoying pessimist to an optimists' ball. They'll hate the music, criticize the
food, and don't try to say "have a nice day" to them. But, in the end, they may be right about it all. ¶ When you read many of the essays in this
collection, you see that being a Foucauldean in disability studies will put you in opposition to much common wisdom and received ideas. In this
sense, true Foucauldeans are contrarians when it comes to celebrating the virtues of identity politics, mainstreaming, and assisted living, for
example. That's why we haven't seen a lot of this work on the disability marketplace, since its tough-to-take analysis doesn't lead to easy
solutions. Another reason is that, unlike Marxism for example, Foucauldism has no obvious political solutions, no party, no ideal state to be
formed, not even the satisfyingly unspecified vision of anarchy. Or, to put it most simply, you
can't smash the state because for
Foucault, like Louis XIV, the state is "moi" How can you have liberation when, as Tremain says, power
"enables subjects to act in order to constrain them" (4) [italics hers]. ¶ Tremain's point is that the disabled
subject is the product of an extensive network of discourse and power. But the discourses and services she
lists--special education, prosthetics, paratransit, home-care ser vices, income support programs, worker's compensation benefits, and the like-will strike most people as beneficial and indeed progressive measures. Why critique these when there is
the world of ableism to take on? Rather, Tremain takes on the idea of the social model, seeing that the disabled subject is
not a naturally occurring phenomenon but one that comes to be through networks of knowledge and
power. As she reminds us, the complexity of being a subject, having subjectivity, also means being the subject
of someone or something else's power. So, in effect, you can't celebrate disability or disability identity
because you'd be celebrating the powers that caused disability to be brought into the world of discourse as
a separate and abnormal state in need of social programs, remediation, care, etc. She then, logically,
critiques the social model saying "it would seem that the identity of the subject of the social model ('people
with impairments') is actually formed in large measure by the political arrangements that the social model was
designed to contest" (10). So impairment, for example, the degree zero of the social model, is for Foucaldeans not a neutral
category, a fact of nature, but a highly articulated category exists "in order to legitimize the governmental
practices that generated it in the first place" (11). ¶ You can see from such a stance why Foucault in his strong
argument isn't necessarily going to go down well with activists, disability-rights advocates, or even
disability-studies programs. Instead of offering disability as a celebrated identity and disability studies as
a liberating discourse, you've got to examine the way you are part of the problem rather than part of the
solution. Many of the essays in this collection go about presenting just that point of view. Nirmala Erevelles compares Foucault's treatment of
Pierre Rivierre, a man who killed his family and who was subjected to an extensive legal, medical study in the 19t' century with the controversy
concerning facilitated communication and autistic people. While it may not be obvious at first, Erevelles points out that both controversies
revolve around trying to define, through rational discourse, what constitutes coherence in a deviant subject. From a Foucauldean perspective,
Erevelles presents the constitutive aspect of these cases without trying to lift some moralizing or celebratory story from the complex narratives.
Or, rather, the enemy is capitalism rather than any rationalizing discourse produced within it. ¶ Bill
Hughes writes one of the
stronger pieces in the collection, and it is perhaps stronger because he critiques Foucault. One of the
ongoing objections to Foucault, articulated by Edward Said among others, is that Foucault's emphasis on "docile
bodies" makes him in effect, as Said has said, a "scribe of power." If one wants to perform the biographical fallacy, one could
explore how Foucault's personal relationship with sadomasochism might somatize and personalize his more academic studies of power and
docility. (1) Hughes begins with the point that Foucault, because he avoided phenomenology, including the work of Merleau-Ponty,
"underestimates
the body's role as subject, that is, as an agent of self- and social transformation" (80).
Hughes notes that the history of people with disability has been one of impotence but that in recent years
this has turned around. However, this change in agency cannot easily be accounted for by Foucault's
oeuvre. Hughes goes onto describe the posthumanist sense of the body, which is essentially textualized, constructed, and whose only form of
political activity is the celebration of diversity of identities (that is to say, the difference presented by constructions of bodies). In its place, he
recommends a phenomenological view of the body as "our point of view on the world" (87). While Hughes presents a valid critique of Foucault,
his solution, the substitution of someone like Merleau-Ponty, leaves one somewhat unsatisfied, if only because Hughes doesn't have the space in
this essay to develop that viewpoint. ¶ Barry Allen
launches another salvo against Foucault, this time for being a
"nominalist" From this strategic position, Allen critiques Foucault for relying too much on a linguistic approach,
seeing his emphasis on discursivity as primarily a familiar recourse to eighteenth-century ideas that names
and things were the same (which ironically Foucualt himself critiques in his seminal Les mots et les choses). Alongside of Hughes's
criticism, we can see emerging some sense of Foucault's lacks--his disengagement, in a sense, with the
world, or his hypothesizing a world that is purely discursive. Indeed, many of the interviews we have with Foucault,
carried on by various political groups and thinkers, focus on this very point. Foucault was always much more activist in these interviews than
in his academic work, and in a way he never figured out how to combine his active life as a demonstrator with his
formal life as a scholar. Of course, some radicals like Noam Chomsky claim there is no relationship,
while others like Edward Said always saw the two as interconnected. ¶ Essays by Fiona Kumari Campbell, Licia
Carlson, and Jane Berger on Supreme Court decisions, the history of institutions for mental retardation and for deafness simply retread Foucault's
more obvious work on legal-juridico systems and totalizing institutions.
A question raised by Berger concerning schools for
the deaf was if there was some value to these institutions. Foucauldeans have never met an institution they
like, so the question is are the deaf better or worse off with schools for the deaf. While there are many stories of the
tragedy of being separated from families at an early age, most of these accounts end up celebrating the community that deaf schools provided and
the life-saving function of learning sign language, usually not available at home. While
schools for people with mental
retardation can be seen, through the retrospectoscope as abysmal institutions tied up with eugenics and
ableist notions of normality (although they probably started out as very progressive institutions devoted to the notion that idiocy was
not an incurable or irremediable state), it is much harder to characterize schools for the deaf as such, although the
easy out is to critique oralism. (2) ¶ An essay by Anne Waldschmidt reviews the idea of normality in a rather superficial way but then
goes on to show how genetic testing instantiates a eugenic program without having to do so by overt means. The use of risk analysis and an
operative notion of normality are enough to enforce decisions to abort disabled fetuses. In this Foucauldean sense, self-surveillance and academic
discourses, in this case risk analysis and genetics, will suffice to give the illusion of freedom and autonomy while accomplishing an ableist
project. Likewise, a section by Maarten Simons and Jan Masschelein explores how normality gets enforced in the context of inclusive education
schemes. Again, here we see that progressive
agendas, like the one that sees disability not as bred into the bones
but as a product of socialization, become ways that governmentality operates in the creation of normative
(read docile) subjects. Thus individualized programs for the education of students with cognitive
disabilities, seen by many as a hallmark of progressive politics and disability-rights activism, are
critiqued. As the authors write, "the 'individual' of the discourse on inclusion is an effect or product of that discourse and the neoliberal forms
of governmentality with which it correlates" (220). In the contrarian logic of contemporary Foucaultism, "human beings
become subjects by exercising freedom according to certain rules, virtues, norms or skills, which they
share with other free subjects" (221). Further, the idea of community, so cherished by progressive
educators and valued in inclusion schemes, is also problematized since, for the authors, community is just
another way of saying we're all part of a totality, hence in a totalitarian set of constraints. ¶ Chris Drinkwater
now takes the Foucauldean wrecking ball to supported living. Using Wolfenberger's work on normalization, Drinkwater shows how the emphasis
in supported living is on having a "normal" life. As he says, "I want to suggest, in the spirit of Foucault, that supported-living arrangements
exemplify not an emancipation, nor even a humanitarian reform, as much as a new dispersal of power relations, one that is entirely in keeping
with the modern drive to greater efficiency" (229), so "the esteemed values of rights, independence, choice, and inclusion obscure the actual lived
relations of support/power" (234). The point is that self-regulating subjects, whether produced through negative means or positive mean, still
produce self-regulating subjects, so the kinds of services and accountability necessary to provide supported living are always regulated, recorded,
inscribed, bureaucratized, and so on. From sexual behaviour to hygiene, from work to social manners--the life of the person in supported living is
intersected with power and surveillance, and "challenging behaviors" are perceived as resistance to the general scheme. ¶ Among chapters on
mobile phones and stadium seating, Kathryn Pauly Morgan's essay on Gender Police stands out as an odd and telling attempt to create a kind of
"kit" for what she calls Gender Dimorphic Utopia (GDU)--the world that surveys and enforces gender norms. The essay isn't explicitly about
disability, but its claim is that if you don't neatly fit into the gender binary, then you are gender disabled. As with much of postmodern thinking in
this area, border crossings, gender outlaws, and gender neutral people are the hero(ine)s. Unlike many of the other essays, this one does have bad
cops and good rebels--and no self-reflexive Foucauldean gaze glares on the rebels against GDU. ¶ The collection is as good as it gets in using
Foucault in disability studies. It will provide thought-provoking discussions amongst its readers. In the end, though, it suffers from
Foucaultitis--a disease of pessimism that can lead to acute defeatism. Foucault, like Adorno, is best read in
small doses and best taken cum granis salis. This is not to say that either Adorno or Foucault isn't speaking truth to power--they
certainly are. But the problem is that when you see power in all the micro-connections that pervade society
(including, for example, this very book review, which aims to instantiate norms of reading, provide authority to criticism, and is being published
by a journal with clear and deep affiliations to what Gramsci calls the Ideological State Apparatus),
then all you can do is describe
power. Endlessly describe it. Consequently, this book provides a valuable corrective to any Pollyannaish views about the triumph of
disability rights or disability studies. It reminds us that we must always be aware and vigilant about the incursions
and byways of power. But perhaps it does not fully understand that asking us to do this is also an act of
governmentality itself. And so on, in an endless mise en abyme. In this sense, Foucaldianism is a problem
without a solution. The method is, in a sense, the madness.
Individual action is not enough.
Allies-person, 11
[Allies-person is self-described as “I am, in no particular order, a historian, cat lover, autistic woman,
Yankee fan, neurodiversity advocate, feminist, Harry Potter fan, Hunger Games fan, fantasy/science
fiction reader, and general supporter of social justice”, 5-2-11, “Perpetually Myself: It's not enough to call
out ableist language,”, http://allies-person.tumblr.com/post/5141183778/its-not-enough-to-call-out-ableistlanguage]
Language is important, but more important still are the underlying assumptions which shape
our society. Assumptions about who is valuable and who isn’t, about what the proper way to
behave is, about what counts as “contributing” to to society/the economy/whatever…the list goes on
and on. Widespread use of “crazy” and “lame” (etc.) are but symptoms of the larger problem—
society is full of ableist assumptions, some of which are very obvious and some of which may be more
subtle—but ableist nonetheless. The elimination of ableist words is but a small part of what needs
to be done, and it frustrates and disappointments me that so much “social justice” work has
stopped at language—which is in many ways the easiest part. Take stigma against people with
intellectual disabilities. I am glad that it’s no longer acceptable to use the r-word in many circles, and
that other words are making some headway. (I struggle with ”idiot” and “crazy” and a lot of others
myself in everyday speech.) But I don’t think this has actually done all that much to promote the
equality and worth of people with intellectual disabilities. There is still the assumption that it is
better to be “intelligent” (whatever that means), that mental illness (however you define that) is
something to be pitied, and that, in short, it’s better to be non-disabled than not. The end result
is a very shallow sort of “social justice” discourse that keeps all of the underlying problematic
assumptions in place while giving lip service to equality. It’s very troubling. Truly examining
one’s ableism does not mean renaming the tags on your blog so that “lame” and “crazy” no longer
appear. It is not being the fifth person on a thread to self-righteously proclaim that “idiot” is ableist,
and then simply stopping at that. That is superficial, and oftentimes little more than a way for
neurotypical and/or able-bodied people to publicly demonstrate their Good Ally status and pat
themselves on the back. Examining one’s ableism means constantly questioning and reformulating basic assumptions which are oftentimes so deeply ingrained that it’s hard even to
see them, let alone disavow them. Take the assumption that “intelligence” is valuable, for
instance. It’s so ingrained in our society, so hard to root out—I’ll not pretend to be perfect on
this score—and yet doing so is vital if we are to create a world in which people with intellectual
disabilities are equals—not simply people-seen-as-lesser whom are condescended to.
***Classism***
2ac Shell – Classism
Trends point toward greater equality – progress is slow and steady.
Beauchamp, Think Progress, 12-11-13
[Zack, “5 Reasons Why 2013 Was The Best Year In Human”
http://thinkprogress.org/security/2013/12/11/3036671/2013-certainly-year-human-history/]
Between the brutal civil war in Syria, the government shutdown and all of the deadly dysfunction it represents, the NSA spying revelations, and
massive inequality, it’d be easy to for you to enter 2014 thinking the last year has been an awful one.¶ But you’d be wrong. We have every
reason to believe that 2013
was, in fact, the best year on the planet for humankind.¶ Contrary to what you might have
heard, virtually all of the most important forces that determine what make people’s lives good — the things
that determine how long they live, and whether they live happily and freely — are trending in an extremely happy direction.
While it’s possible that this progress could be reversed by something like runaway climate change, the effects will
have to be dramatic to overcome the extraordinary and growing progress we’ve made in making the
world a better place.¶ Here’s the five big reasons why.¶ 1. Fewer people are dying young, and more are living
longer.¶ India Polio¶ CREDIT: AP PHOTO/MAHESH KUMAR¶ The greatest story in recent human history is the simplest:
we’re winning the fight against death. “There is not a single country in the world where infant or child
mortality today is not lower than it was in 1950,” writes Angus Deaton, a Princeton economist who
works on global health issues.¶ The most up-to-date numbers on global health, the 2013 World Health Organization (WHO)
statistical compendium, confirm Deaton’s estimation. Between 1990 and 2010, the percentage of children who died before their fifth
birthday dropped by almost half. Measles deaths declined by 71 percent, and both tuberculosis and maternal deaths by half again. HIV, that
modern plague, is also being held back, with deaths from AIDS-related illnesses down by 24 percent since 2005.¶ In short, fewer people are
dying untimely deaths. And that’s
not only true in rich countries: life expectancy has gone up between 1990 and
2011 in every WHO income bracket. The gains are even more dramatic if you take the long view: global life expectancy was 47 in
the early 1950s, but had risen to 70 — a 50 percent jump — by 2011. For even more perspective, the average Briton in 1850 — when the British
Empire had reached its apex — was 40. The average person today should expect to live almost twice as long as the average citizen of the
world’s wealthiest and most powerful country in 1850.¶ In real terms, this means millions of fewer dead adults and children a year, millions
fewer people who spend their lives suffering the pains and unfreedoms imposed by illness, and millions more people spending their twilight
years with loved ones. And the trends are all positive — “progress has accelerated in recent years in many countries with the highest rates of
mortality,” as the WHO rather bloodlessly put it.¶ What’s going on? Obviously, it’s fairly complicated, but the
most important drivers
have been technological and political innovation. The Enlightenment-era advances in the scientific
method got people doing high-quality research, which brought us modern medicine and the information
technologies that allow us to spread medical breakthroughs around the world at increasingly faster
rates. Scientific discoveries also fueled the Industrial Revolution and the birth of modern capitalism,
giving us more resources to devote to large-scale application of live-saving technologies. And the global
spread of liberal democracy made governments accountable to citizens, forcing them to attend to their
health needs or pay the electoral price.¶ We’ll see the enormously beneficial impact of these two forces, technology and
democracy, repeatedly throughout this list, which should tell you something about the foundations of human progress. But when talking about
improvements in health, we shouldn’t neglect foreign aid. Nations donating huge amounts of money out of an altruistic interest in the welfare
of foreigners is historically unprecedented, and while not all aid has been helpful, health aid has been a huge boon.¶ Even Deaton, who wrote
one of 2013′s harshest assessments of foreign aid, believes “the case for assistance to fight disease such as HIV/AIDS or smallpox is strong.”
That’s because these programs have demonstrably saved lives — the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), a 2003 program
pushed by President Bush, paid for anti-retroviral treatment for over 5.1 million people in the poor countries hardest-hit by the AIDS epidemic.¶
So we’re
outracing the Four Horseman, extending our lives faster than pestilence, war, famine, and death can take them. That
alone should be enough to say the world is getting better.¶ 2. Fewer people suffer from extreme
poverty, and the world is getting happier.¶ APTOPIX India Maha Kumbh¶ CREDIT: SAURABH DAS/AP PHOTO¶ There are
fewer people in abject penury than at any other point in human history, and middle class people enjoy
their highest standard of living ever. We haven’t come close to solving poverty: a number of African countries in
particular have chronic problems generating growth, a nut foreign aid hasn’t yet cracked. So this
isn’t a call for complacency about
poverty any more than acknowledging victories over disease is an argument against tackling malaria. But make no mistake: as a
whole, the world is much richer in 2013 than it was before.¶ 721 million fewer people lived in extreme
poverty ($1.25 a day) in 2010 than in 1981, according to a new World Bank study from October. That’s
astounding — a decline from 40 to about 14 percent of the world’s population suffering from abject
want. And poverty rates are declining in every national income bracket: even in low income countries, the
percentage of people living in extreme poverty ($1.25 a day in 2005 dollars) a day gone down from 63 in 1981 to 44 in 2010.¶ We can be fairly
confident that these trends are continuing. For one thing, they survived the Great Recession in 2008. For another, the decline in poverty has
been fueled by global economic growth, which looks to be continuing: global GDP grew by 2.3 percent in 2012, a number that’ll rise to 2.9
percent in 2013 according to IMF projections.¶ The bulk of the recent decline in poverty comes form India and China — about 80 percent from
China *alone*. Chinese economic and social reform, a delayed reaction to the mass slaughter and starvation of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, has
been the engine of poverty’s global decline. If you subtract China, there are actually more poor people today than there were in 1981
(population growth trumping the percentage declines in poverty).¶ But we shouldn’t discount China. If what we care about is fewer people
suffering the misery of poverty, then it shouldn’t matter what nation the less-poor people call home. Chinese growth should be celebrated, not
shunted aside.¶ The
poor haven’t been the only people benefitting from global growth. Middle class people
have access to an ever-greater stock of life-improving goods. Televisions and refrigerators, once luxury goods, are now
comparatively cheap and commonplace. That’s why large-percentage improvements in a nation’s GDP appear to correlate strongly with higher
levels of happiness among the nation’s citizens; people like having things that make their lives easier and more worry-free.¶ Global economic
growth in the past five decades has dramatically reduced poverty and made people around the world happier. Once again, we’re better off.¶
3. War is becoming rarer and less deadly.¶ APTOPIX Mideast Libya¶ CREDIT: AP PHOTO/ MANU BRABO¶ Another massive
conflict could overturn the global progress against disease and poverty. But it appears war, too, may be losing its fangs.¶ Steven Pinker’s
2011 book The Better Angels Of Our Nature is the gold standard in this debate. Pinker brought a treasure trove of
data to bear on the question of whether the world has gotten more peaceful, and found that, in the long arc of
human history, both war and other forms of violence (the death penalty, for instance) are on a
centuries-long downward slope.¶ Pinker summarizes his argument here if you don’t own the book. Most eye-popping are
the numbers for the past 50 years; Pinker finds that “the worldwide rate of death from interstate and
civil war combined has juddered downward…from almost 300 per 100,000 world population during
World War II, to almost 30 during the Korean War, to the low teens during the era of the Vietnam War,
to single digits in the 1970s and 1980s, to less than 1 in the twenty-first century.” Here’s what that looks like
graphed:¶ Pinker¶ CREDIT: STEVEN PINKER/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL¶ So it looks like the smallest percentage of humans alive
since World War II, and in all likelihood in human history, are living through the horrors of war. Did 2013 give us any reason
to believe that Pinker and the other scholars who agree with him have been proven wrong?¶ Probably not. The academic debate over the
decline of war really exploded in 2013, but the “declinist” thesis has fared pretty well. Challenges
to Pinker’s conclusion that battle
deaths have gone down over time have not withstood scrutiny. The most compelling critique, a new paper by Bear F. Braumoeller,
argues that if you control for the larger number of countries in the last 50 years, war happens at roughly the same rates as it has historically.¶
There are lots of things you might say about Braumoeller’s argument, and I’ve asked Pinker for his two cents (update: Pinker’s response here).
But most importantly, if battle deaths per 100,000 people really has declined, then his argument doesn’t mean very much. If
(percentagewise) fewer people are dying from war, then what we call “war” now is a lot less deadly than “war” used
to be. Braumoeller suggests population growth and improvements in battle medicine explain the decline, but that’s not convincing: tell me
with a straight face that the only differences in deadliness between World War II, Vietnam, and the wars you see today is that there are more
people and better doctors.¶ There’s a more rigorous way of putting that: today,
we see many more civil wars than we do
wars between nations. The former tend to be less deadly than the latter. That’s why the other major challenge to Pinker’s
thesis in 2013, the deepening of the Syrian civil war, isn’t likely to upset the overall trend. Syria’s war is an unimaginable
tragedy, one responsible for the rare, depressing increase in battle deaths from 2011 to 2012. However, the overall 2011-2012 trend
“fits well with the observed long-term decline in battle deaths,” according to researchers at the
authoritative Uppsala Conflict Data Program, because the uptick is not enough to suggest an overall
change in trend. We should expect something similar when the 2013 numbers are published.¶ Why are smaller and smaller percentages
of people being exposed to the horrors of war? There are lots of reasons one could point to, but two of the biggest ones are the spread of
democracy and humans getting, for lack of a better word, better.¶ That democracies never, or almost never, go to war with each other is not
seriously in dispute: the statistical evidence is ridiculously strong. While some argue that the “democratic peace,” as it’s called, is caused by
things other than democracy itself, there’s
good experimental evidence that democratic leaders and citizens just
don’t want to fight each other.¶ Since 1950, democracy has spread around the world like wildfire. There
were only a handful of democracies after World War II, but that grew to roughly 40 percent of all by the end of the Cold War. Today, a
comfortable majority — about 60 percent — of all states are democracies. This freer world is also a safer one.¶ Second — and this is Pinker’s
preferred explanation — people have developed strategies for dealing with war’s causes and consequences. “Human ingenuity and experience
have gradually been brought to bear,” Pinker writes, “just as they have chipped away at hunger and disease.” A series of human inventions,
things like U.N. peacekeeping operations, which nowadays are very successful at reducing violence, have given us a set of social tools
increasingly well suited to reducing the harm caused by armed conflict.¶ War’s decline isn’t accidental, in other words. It’s by design.¶
4.
Rates of murder and other violent crimes are in free-fall.¶ Britain Unrest¶ CREDIT: AKIRA SUEMORI/AP PHOTOS¶
Pinker’s trend against violence isn’t limited just to war. It seems likes crimes, both of the sort states
commit against their citizens and citizens commit against each other, are also on the decline.¶ Take a few
examples. Slavery, once commonly sanctioned by governments, is illegal everywhere on earth. The use of torture as legal
punishment has gone down dramatically. The European murder rate fell 35-fold from the Middle Ages to
the beginning of the 20th century (check out this amazing 2003 paper from Michael Eisner, who dredged up medieval records to
estimate European homicide rates in the swords-and-chivalry era, if you don’t believe me).¶ The decline has been especially marked in recent
years. Though homicide crime rates climbed back up from their historic lows between the 1970s and 1990s, reversing progress made since the
late 19th century, they have collapsed worldwide in the 21st century. 557,000
people were murdered in 2001 — almost
three times as many as were killed in war that year. In 2008, that number was 289,000, and the
homicide rate has been declining in 75 percent of nations since then.¶ Statistics from around the developed world,
where numbers are particularly reliable, show that it’s not just homicide that’s on the wane: it’s almost all violent
crime. US government numbers show that violent crime in the United States declined from a peak of about 750 crimes per 100,000
Americans to under 450 by 2009. G7 as a whole countries show huge declines in homicide, robbery, and vehicle theft.¶ So even in countries
that aren’t at poor or at war, most people’s lives are getting safer and more secure. Why?¶ We know it’s not incarceration. While the United
States and Britain have dramatically increased their prison populations, others, like Canada, the Netherlands, and Estonia, reduced their
incarceration rates and saw similar declines in violent crime. Same thing state-to-state in the United States; New York imprisoned fewer people
and saw the fastest crime decline in the country.¶ The Economist’s deep dive into the explanations for crime’s collapse provides a few answers.
Globally, police have gotten better at working with communities and targeting areas with the most crime. They’ve also gotten new toys, like
DNA testing, that make it easier to catch criminals.¶ The crack epidemic in the United States and its heroin twin in Europe have both slowed
down dramatically. Rapid gentrification has made inner-city crime harder. And the increasing cheapness of “luxury” goods like iPods and DVD
players has reduced incentives for crime on both the supply and demand sides: stealing a DVD player isn’t as profitable, and it’s easier for a
would-be thief to buy one in the first place.¶ But there’s one explanation The Economist dismissed that strikes me as hugely important: the
abolition of lead gasoline. Kevin
Drum at Mother Jones wrote what’s universally acknowledged to be the
definitive argument for the lead/crime link, and it’s incredibly compelling. We know for a fact that lead
exposure damages people’s brains and can potentially be fatal; that’s why an international campaign to
ban leaded gasoline started around 1970. Today, leaded gasoline is almost unheard of — it’s banned in 175
countries, and there’s been a decline in lead blood levels by about 90 percent.¶ Drum marshals a wealth of evidence that the
parts of the brain damaged by lead are the same ones that check people’s aggressive impulses. Moreover,
the timing matches up: crime shot up in the mid-to-late-20th century as cars spread around the world, and started to decline in the 70s as the
anti-lead campaign was succeeding. Here’s close the relationship is, using data from the United States:¶ Lead_Crime_325¶ Now, non-homicide
violent crime appears to have ticked up in 2012, based on U.S. government surveys of victims of crime, but it’s
very possible that’s
just a blip: the official Department of Justice report says up-front that “the apparent increase in the rate of violent crimes reported to police
from 2011 to 2012 was not statistically significant.Ӧ So we have no reason to believe crime is making a come back, and every reason to believe
the historical decline in criminal violence is here to stay.¶
5. There’s less racism, sexism, and other forms of
discrimination in the world.¶ Nelson Mandela¶ CREDIT: THEANA CALITZ/AP IMAGES¶ Racism, sexism, anti-Semitism,
homophobia, and other forms of discrimination remain, without a doubt, extraordinarily powerful
forces. The statistical and experimental evidence is overwhelming — this irrefutable proof of widespread discrimination against AfricanAmericans, for instance, should put the “racism is dead” fantasy to bed.¶ Yet the need to combat discrimination denial shouldn’t blind us to
the good news. Over the centuries, humanity has made extraordinary progress in taming its hate for and ill-
treatment of other humans on the basis of difference alone. Indeed, it is very likely that we live in the
least discriminatory era in the history of modern civilization. It’s not a huge prize given how bad the past
had been, but there are still gains worth celebrating.¶ Go back 150 years in time and the point should be
obvious. Take four prominent groups in 1860: African-Americans were in chains, European Jews were routinely
massacred in the ghettos and shtetls they were confined to, women around the world were denied the opportunity to work outside the home
and made almost entirely subordinate to their husbands, and LGBT people were invisible. The improvements in each of these group’s statuses
today, both in the United States and internationally, are incontestable. ¶ On closer look, we
have reason to believe the happy
trends are likely to continue. Take racial discrimination. In 2000, Harvard sociologist Lawrence Bobo
penned a comprehensive assessment of the data on racial attitudes in the United States. He found a
“national consensus” on the ideals of racial equality and integration. “A nation once comfortable as a
deliberately segregationist and racially discriminatory society has not only abandoned that view,” Bobo
writes, “but now overtly positively endorses the goals of racial integration and equal treatment. There is
no sign whatsoever of retreat from this ideal, despite events that many thought would call it into
question. The magnitude, steadiness, and breadth of this change should be lost on no one.Ӧ The norm
against overt racism has gone global. In her book on the international anti-apartheid movement in the 1980s, Syracuse’s Audie
Klotz says flatly that “the illegitimacy of white minority rule led to South Africa’s persistent diplomatic, cultural, and economic isolation.” The
belief that racial discrimination could not be tolerated had become so widespread, Klotz argues, that it united the globe — including
governments that had strategic interests in supporting South Africa’s whites — in opposition to apartheid. In 2011, 91 percent of respondents
in a sample of 21 diverse countries said that equal treatment of people of different races or ethnicities was important to them.¶ Racism
obviously survived both American and South African apartheid, albeit in more subtle, insidious forms.
“The death of Jim Crow racism has left us in an uncomfortable place,” Bobo writes, “a state of laissez-faire racism” where racial discrimination
and disparities still exist, but support for the kind of aggressive government policies needed to address them is racially polarized. But
there’s reason to hope that’ll change as well: two massive studies of the political views of younger
Americans by my TP Ideas colleagues, John Halpin and Ruy Teixeira, found that millenials were
significantly more racially tolerant and supportive of government action to address racial disparities
than the generations that preceded them. Though I’m not aware of any similar research of on a global scale, it’s hard not to
imagine they’d find similar results, suggesting that we should have hope that the power of racial prejudice may be waning.¶ The story
about gender discrimination is very similar: after the feminist movement’s enormous victories in the
20th century, structural sexism still shapes the world in profound ways, but the cause of gender equality
is making progress. In 2011, 86 percent of people in a diverse 21 country sample said that equal
treatment on the basis of gender was an important value. The U.N.’s Human Development Report’s
Gender Inequality Index — a comprehensive study of reproductive health, social empowerment, and
labor market equity — saw a 20 percent decline in observable gender inequalities from 1995 to 2011.
IMF data show consistent global declines in wage disparities between genders, labor force participation, and
educational attainment around the world. While enormous inequality remains, 2013 is looking to be the worst year for sexism in history. ¶
Finally, we’ve made astonishing progress on sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination —
largely in the past 15 years. At the beginning of 2003, zero Americans lived in marriage equality states;
by the end of 2013, 38 percent of Americans will. Article 13 of the European Community Treaty bans discrimination on the
grounds of sexual orientation, and, in 2011, the UN Human Rights Council passed a resolution committing the council to documenting and
exposing discrimination on orientation or identity grounds around the world. The public
opinion trends are positive
worldwide: all of the major shifts from 2007 to 2013 in Pew’s “acceptance of homosexuality” poll were
towards greater tolerance, and young people everywhere are more open to equality for LGBT individuals than their older peers.¶
best_year_graphics-04¶ Once again, these victories are partial and by no means inevitable. Racism, sexism,
homophobia, and other forms of discrimination aren’t just “going away” on their own. They’re losing
their hold on us because people are working to change other people’s minds and because governments
are passing laws aimed at promoting equality. Positive trends don’t mean the problems are close to
solved, and certainly aren’t excuses for sitting on our hands.¶ That’s true of everything on this list. The fact that fewer people are dying from
war and disease doesn’t lessen the moral imperative to do something about those that are; the fact that people are getting richer and safer in
their homes isn’t an excuse for doing more to address poverty and crime.¶ But too often, the worst parts about the world are treated as
inevitable, the prospect of radical victory over pain and suffering dismissed as utopian fantasy. The overwhelming force of the evidence shows
that to be false. As best we can tell, the reason humanity is getting better is because humans have decided to make the world a better place.
We consciously chose to develop lifesaving medicine and build freer political systems; we’ve passed laws against workplace discrimination and
poisoning children’s minds with lead.¶ So far, these choices have more than paid off. It’s up to us to make sure they continue to.
The state is necessary for reforming capitalism – otherwise it coopts movements or
allows businesses to thwart them – occupy proves.
Farber, City University of New York Brooklyn College political science professor, 913-12
[Samuel, “Occupy Wall Street and the Art of Demanding” http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/11507occupy-wall-street-and-the-art-of-demanding]
Of all the internal controversies Occupy generated, the one over whether the movement should adopt
specific demands may have been the most significant. The resistance to raising demands, particularly on
the state, is understandable since the notion of demands has become associated with negotiation,
legislation and similar “business as usual” that would blunt and even compromise the radical edge of the
movement. Anarchist and quasi-anarchist currents have played a role in rousing that reluctance among
people who may not be ideological anarchists but who may be receptive to the anarchist message on this
issue for a number of reasons but especially because of two kinds of fears.[i]¶ One fear is that whatever
success the Occupy movement attains may become narrowed down or even wiped out through judicial,
legislative or governmental administrative undermining or sabotage. This is a rational concern based on
real historical experience. However, the real root of the problem lies on the strength – or weakness – of
the movement, and not on the pitfalls inherent to the demand for reforms itself. This becomes especially
evident when the movement weakens after the reform has been gained leading to a change in the relation
of forces that in turn propitiates the cooptation, bureaucratization and sellout of movement leaders. This
has been the case with the American labor movement since the late thirties. Labor reforms like the
National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) granting workers the legal right to organize unions and engage in
collective bargaining were already born with limitations in coverage and other features undermining
worker autonomy, betraying the original goals that people fought for. Later, organized labor was unable
to defeat subsequent legislation such as the post World War II Taft-Hartley Act that undermined many of
the positive features of the original legislation. But this has been, more than any other factors, the
outcome of labor’s weakness relative to the increased power of the corporations, not of raising demands
by the workers on the state as such. The labor movements and left parties in western Europe generally
succeeded in winning labor and welfare state reforms that were substantially more comprehensive and
favorable to the working class and the poor, not because they did not make demands on the state but
because they were much stronger than their American counterparts.
EXTN – Uniqueness – Classism
World is getting better – 2013 was the best year on the planet – every metric goes
[insert side], people are living longer, less people are experiencing war, the world is
richer in every income bracket and discriminating against poor people less – that’s
Beauchamp. Prefer it – our ev takes into account their args – their ev cites
snapshots, our cites trends and has recency.
Squo is structurally improving – multiple indicators.
Lomborg, Copenhagen Business School professor, 10-16-13
[Bjorn, “A Better World Is Here” http://www.project-syndicate.org/print/bj-rn-lomborgon-the-decliningcosts-of-global-problems]
For centuries, optimists and pessimists have argued over the state of the world. Pessimists see a world
where more people means less food, where rising demand for resources means depletion and war, and,
in recent decades, where boosting production capacity means more pollution and global warming. One of
the current generation of pessimists’ sacred texts, The Limits to Growth, influences the environmental movement to this day.¶ The
optimists, by contrast, cheerfully claim that everything – human health, living standards, environmental
quality, and so on – is getting better. Their opponents think of them as “cornucopian” economists, placing their faith in the
market to fix any and all problems.¶ But, rather than picking facts and stories to fit some grand narrative of decline
or progress, we should try to compare across all areas of human existence to see if the world really is
doing better or worse. Together with 21 of the world’s top economists, I have tried to do just that,
developing a scorecard spanning 150 years. Across ten areas – including health, education, war, gender,
air pollution, climate change, and biodiversity – the economists all answered the same question: What
was the relative cost of this problem in every year since 1900, all the way to 2013, with predictions to
2050.¶ Using classic economic valuations of everything from lost lives, bad health, and illiteracy to wetlands destruction and increased
hurricane damage from global warming, the economists show how much each problem costs. To estimate the magnitude of the problem, it is
compared to the total resources available to fix it. This gives us the problem’s size as a share of GDP. And the trends since 1900 are sometimes
surprising.¶ Consider
gender inequality. Essentially, we were excluding almost half the world’s population from production. In
1900, only 15% of the global workforce was female. What is the loss from lower female workforce participation? Even
taking into account that someone has to do unpaid housework and the increased costs of female
education, the loss was at least 17% of global GDP in 1900. Today, with higher female participation and
lower wage differentials, the loss is 7% – and projected to fall to 4% by 2050.¶ It will probably come as a big
surprise that climate change is expected to be mostly an increasing net benefit – rising to about 1.5% of GDP per year – in the period from 1900
to 2025. This is because global warming has mixed effects; for moderate warming, the benefits prevail.¶ On one hand, because CO2 works as a
fertilizer, higher levels have been a boon for agriculture, which comprises the biggest positive impact, at 0.8% of GDP. Likewise, moderate
warming prevents more cold deaths than the number of extra heat deaths that it causes. It also reduces demand for heating more than it
increases the costs of cooling, implying a gain of about 0.4% of GDP. On the other hand, warming increases water stress, costing about 0.2% of
GDP, and negatively affects ecosystems like wetlands, at a cost of about 0.1%.¶ As temperatures rise, however, the costs will rise and the
benefits will decline, leading to a dramatic reduction in net benefits. After
the year 2070, global warming will become a net
cost to the world, justifying cost-effective climate action now and in the decades to come.¶ Yet, to put
matters in perspective, the scorecard also shows us that the world’s biggest environmental problem by
far is indoor air pollution. Today, indoor pollution from cooking and heating with bad fuels kills more than three
million people annually, or the equivalent of a loss of 3% of global GDP. But in 1900, the cost was 19% of GDP, and it is expected to
drop to 1% of GDP by 2050.¶ Health indicators worldwide have shown some of the largest improvements.
Human life expectancy barely changed before the late eighteenth century. Yet it is difficult to overstate
the magnitude of the gain since 1900: in that year, life expectancy worldwide was 32 years, compared to
69 now (and a projection of 76 years in 2050).¶ The biggest factor was the fall in infant mortality. For
example, even as late as 1970, only around 5% of infants were vaccinated against measles, tetanus,
whooping cough, diphtheria, and polio. By 2000, it was 85%, saving about three million lives annually –
more, each year, than world peace would have saved in the twentieth century.¶ This success has many parents. The Gates Foundation and the
GAVI Alliance have spent more than $2.5 billion and promised another $10 billion for vaccines. Efforts by the Rotary Club, the World Health
Organization, and many others have reduced polio by 99% worldwide since 1979.¶ In
economic terms, the cost of poor health
at the outset of the twentieth century was an astounding 32% of global GDP. Today, it is down to about
11%, and by 2050 it will be half that.¶ While the optimists are not entirely right (loss of biodiversity in the
twentieth century probably cost about 1% of GDP per year, with some places losing much more), the overall picture is clear. Most
of the topics in the scorecard show improvements of 5-20% of GDP. And the overall trend is even
clearer. Global problems have declined dramatically relative to the resources available to tackle them.¶ Of
course, this does not mean that there are no more problems. Although much smaller, problems in health, education, malnutrition, air pollution,
gender inequality, and trade remain large.¶ But realists
should now embrace the view that the world is doing much
better. Moreover, the scorecard shows us where the substantial challenges remain for a better 2050. We
should guide our future attention not on the basis of the scariest stories or loudest pressure groups, but on objective assessments of where we
can do the most good.
Cap is sustainable – crises don’t threaten the overall system
Becker, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, 14
(Gary, University Professor of Economics and Sociology at the University of Chicago, was
awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1992, member of Hoover’s Working Group
on Economic Policy and Shultz-Stephenson Task Force on Energy Policy, 1-21-14, “Capitalism’s Nine
(and More) Lives,” hoover digest » 2014 no. 1, http://www.hoover.org/publications/hooverdigest/article/165156)
Karl Marx saw every major depression in the nineteenth century as the¶ final crisis of capitalism that,
because of the system’s “internal contradictions,”¶ would usher in the era of socialism and communism.
Alas for¶ Marx. Each time he was proved wrong when the end of these depressions¶ was often followed by
an even stronger capitalist surge.¶ Something similar has taken place during the past few major world¶
financial crises. The Asia crisis led to a book in 1998 by eminent financier¶ George Soros titled The Crisis
of Global Capitalism, although eventually¶ he retracted his forecast that this was the major crisis of
capitalism. The¶ collapse of Lehman Brothers and the resulting financial crisis and Great¶ Recession
created a robust market for collapse-of-capitalism forecasters.¶ Public television’s well-respected
NewsHour questioned whether “capitalism¶ is dead” in 2008. That same year the Guardian in Britain had
an¶ article that billed its premise as “not the death of capitalism, but the birth¶ of a new order. The freemarket model has been discredited and now its¶ champions are panicking at what might emerge in its
wake.”¶ In 2009 the Financial Times commissioned a series of articles with very¶ different viewpoints,
most pessimistic, on the future of capitalism in the¶ wake of the financial crisis. Kevin Murphy and I had
the most optimistic¶ article in this series, too optimistic for its critics, with the title “Do not let¶ the ‘cure’
destroy capitalism.” We stressed, among other things, that¶ in devising reforms that aim to reduce the
likelihood of future severe¶ contractions, the accomplishments of capitalism should be appreciated.¶
Governments should not so hamper markets that they are prevented from¶ bringing rapid growth to the
poor economies of Africa, Asia and elsewhere¶ that have had limited participation in the global economy. .
. . The¶ Great Depression induced a massive worldwide retreat from capitalism¶ and an embrace of
socialism and communism that continued into the¶ 1960s. It also fostered a belief that the future lay in
government management¶ of the economy, not in freer markets. The result was generally slow¶ growth
during those decades in most of the undeveloped world, including¶ China, the Soviet bloc nations, India,
and Africa.¶ In taking stock at this point of what happened now that the crisis is¶ over and the recovery is
under way, it has become clear after considerable¶ uncertainty that capitalism has mainly won out, and
those calling for radical¶ changes in the world economy have been defeated. To be sure, regulation¶ of
banks has increased through greater capital requirements, scrutiny of pay¶ practices, and various other
ways formulated in the Dodd-Frank Act and¶ other laws Europe and elsewhere. But the main investment
banks like Goldman¶ Sachs, JP Morgan, and others are still big, profitable, and very active,¶ and
quasigovernmental companies like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac may¶ be forced to cut back their
extensive and unwise activities.¶ Outside the financial sectors in the United States and Europe, capitalism¶
is more prominent than ever. Country after country is reducing¶ the scale of its public enterprises and
expanding the scope of the private¶ sector. For the first time in almost seventy years, Mexico has opened
its¶ oil and other energy sectors to greater participation by private firms. The¶ new leaders of China have
expressed dissatisfaction with the performance¶ of public enterprises, and have called for greater
participation by private¶ firms in many sectors, including financial markets.¶ The formerly mainly socialist
government of Rwanda, a very poor¶ nation, has been encouraging private companies to increase their role
in¶ the economy. India is trying to reduce its many labor-market and other¶ regulations so direct foreign
investment will increase and India’s own private¶ firms will expand their activities. On the other side of
the ledger,¶ nations like Venezuela that have conducted a war on the private sector¶ have seen poverty
grow and economies stagnate.¶ The reason behind these recent pro-capitalist activities is that more¶ and
more countries have realized that despite its many flaws, capitalism¶ is the only system yet devised that
brings hope of lifting the masses out¶ of poverty and creating a robust middle class. Most people realize
this,¶ and have prevented political leaders from using the reaction against¶ capitalism brought on by the
financial crisis to try to radically transform¶ a system that has brought so much wealth and health to the
peoples¶ of the world.
Neoliberalism is sustainable, resilient, and good.
Pipe, Middle East Forum director, 2011
[Nicholas, 6-22-11, “The Global Financial Crisis” http://www.perspectivist.com/business/the-globalfinancial-crisis]
The Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2007-2010 was one of the darkest chapters in the history of
economics. Millions of people around the globe were hit by the effects of the downturn, and global economies are yet to fully
recover. Indeed, the sheer scale of the GFC meant that it was widely touted as the death knell for neo-liberal
economics – the free-market system utilised by states from which the crisis stemmed.¶ But while hordes of
financial commentators and bedroom economists promptly took aim at neo-liberalism, few people took a
step back to look at the bigger picture. There is no such thing as a perfect economic model, and neoliberalism has significant advantages. After all, it would not have become the standard for the Western
economic system if it were useless. Furthermore, this particular crisis was caused by a small number of
renegade bankers and corporations within the system, rather than the system itself. To put it simply, the GFC did
not show the folly of states which chose to follow neo-liberal economic models.¶ Neo-liberalism may have its flaws, but then so
does every alternative system. Look at Keynesianism, for example – according to academic Ngaire Woods, the model typified by
market regulation, almost paranoid levels of state economic control, and therefore the polar opposite of neo-liberalism. After the GFC, leaders
like Kevin Rudd and Nicolas Sarkozy called for a Keynesian revival, in light of its effectiveness in re-establishing economies in crisis. However,
several economic thinkers – and even history itself – have shown that Keynesianism is deeply flawed and eventually creates new problems. ¶ After
WWII, the world economy was in a similar state to that of today. International markets were unstable due to the late 1920s financial crisis, and
the Keynesian model was adopted to fix the problem and prevent it from reoccurring. Sound familiar? It worked for a few years, but soon led to
severe inflation – one of the inherent dangers of the Keynesian system.¶ Celebrated economist Friederich Hayek compared the maintenance of
Keynesianism to “holding a tiger by the tail”. Between 1972 and 1974, US inflation rates more than tripled to a whopping 12.3%. In 1974, one of
the worst US stock market crashes in history occurred and, ironically, the exact event that Keynesian policies are meant to help avoid took place.¶
Prominent Australian economist Henry Ergas points out that Keynesian stimulus packages, which were offered by many governments after the
GFC, actually create rorting possibilities on a vast scale. Regulation did not stop this behaviour from occurring on a daily basis in European
economies, and it certainly didn’t help several of them from stagnating soon after. ¶ Writing in The Australian on April 9, 2010, Ergas sums this
up perfectly: “The European basket cases of Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain, with their bloated public sectors, vast social transfers and
pervasive regulation… are far from being living exemplars of the failings of Hayekian (neo-liberal) doctrines.”¶ So the Keynesian system is
clearly not immune to financial crises, and is not a fool-proof solution to contemporary financial issues. It is not a flawless alternative to neoliberalism. To be honest, other approaches – such as Marxism and Mercantilism – aren’t much better.¶ Marxist economic models are based on
equality, and in the globalised society that has been built over the last 30 years, equality simply cannot work. As Nobel-prize-winning economist
Milton Friedman said: “A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high
degree of both.Ӧ So, pick up the average economics textbook, flip past the models already discussed in this article and you will arrive at the last
alternative still standing – the archaic system of mercantilism. Put out of fashion over 100 years ago, mercantilism is geared towards aggressive
territorial expansion and extreme nationalist and protectionist trade policy, which makes it a threat to both international security and economic
prosperity in our globalised world. Economics professor Laura LaHaye notes that during the mercantilist period, military conflict between nationstates was “more frequent and more extensive than at any other time in history”. She also says that once England discarded mercantilism for free
trade policy in 1860, it “became the dominant economic power in Europe”. Mercantilism is a laughable alternative to neo-liberalism, and the
dwindling number of vocal neo-mercantilists in the world today is relatively unsurprising. ¶ Distinguished
international relations
intellectual Chris Brown writes in his book Understand International Relations: “It is striking that
although a great many groups have presented strong critiques of economic globalisation (neo-liberalism),
positive alternatives are fewer on the ground”. His point is embodied by the models of Keynesianism, Marxism and
mercantilism, which, clearly, are not flawless alternatives to neo-liberalism. His point is also founded by the view that the
undeniable advantages of neo-liberalism – along with the benefits it has brought to people globally – are
easily overlooked by people rushing to condemn the system in the wake of the GFC.¶ To see how neoliberalism promotes strong economic growth, all you need to do is compare the neo-liberal-based US
economy with the heavily regulated economic system of the European Union (EU). This year, the growth rate of
the US economy is expected to exceed that of the EU by two percentage points. This might not sound like a large margin, but as IMF director
Dominique Strauss-Kahn commented, it’s similar to the EU “being relegated to the second division”. However, the consumer cultures of the EU
and US are the same, so the vast difference in economic growth all boils down to American neo-liberalism. Free-market policy has allowed US
labour and product markets to become more competitive than their more-regulated European counterparts, in turn, allowing them to prosper.¶
When assisted by the other neo-liberal views of globalisation and foreign investment, this economic
growth leads to other social benefits; it “trickles down” to marginalised populations, while open borders
ensure the most efficient distributions of goods worldwide. As a result, closing the gap between affluent
and marginalised populations is encouraged. Ergas summarises the effects of this phenomenon as: “(liberalism) works,
while the interventionist prescription doesn’t. Ask the hundreds of millions of Chinese, Indians and
Vietnamese whom liberalisation has lifted out of poverty.Ӧ The benefits of neo-liberalism are clear, and it
is fallacious to overlook them when judging the system itself in the wake of the GFC. Yet there is something
else that any critic of neo-liberalism must consider – the fact that, like it or not, neo-liberalism is here to
stay. As Chris Brown notes, the system has become hegemonic and so deeply entrenched in society that
its ideals are now part of how things really are. You only have to look at the US Government’s need to
bail out and protect several corporations at the height of the GFC to see how deep rooted the neoliberalism system is, and how its influence lives on.¶ So if anyone was disgraced by the GFC, it was the handful of reckless minority
parties who caused it, not the states whose neo-liberal systems were rorted by such parties. Kevin Rudd blamed “wild corporate cowboy
behaviour” for the GFC, but to say that all corporate employees are cowboys is to make a hasty stereotypical view. The true responsibility for the
crisis falls on a few irresponsible individuals, whose poor judgements have tarnished the reputations of themselves and their colleagues.¶
Obviously, those “irresponsible individuals” are not a prerequisite of the neo-liberal system, so therefore system should not shoulder the blame.
In 2008, US Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said he was in “shocked disbelief” that the GFC had even occurred under a neo-liberal
system.¶ It is easy to suggest that neo-liberalism was at the root of the GFC, but when the events of 2007 and beyond are analysed in greater
depth, it becomes clear that such a suggestion is misguided. A handful of individuals operating outside the true ideals of neo-liberalism were
responsible for the crisis, not the system itself. So instead of attacking states for using the system, overnight critics of neo-liberalism should save
their spite for those renegades at the heart of the crisis.¶ Neo-liberalism
is far from perfect, but the world is yet to see a
more effective economic system, no matter how much uproar Keynesian advocates create. The neo-liberal system has
seen a myriad of benefits for the global economic system and marginalised populations in terms of growth
and prosperity, and will be with us as a sustainable economy for the foreseeable future.
Capitalism self-corrects – also proves that their alt gets coopted.
Rothkopf, Carnegie Endowment Visiting Scholar, 11/21/2008
[David, "What's Next for Capitalism?,"
http://www.carnegieendowment.org/publications/index.cfm?fa=view&id=22434&prog=zgp&proj=zusr]
The genius of all great systems is their ability to reinvent themselves, to adapt and adjust to
changing environments. This ability not just to evolve is one of the central characteristics of
capitalism. Even in its darkest moments—perhaps especially in its darkest moments—it tears down that which
does not work and creates incentives for people and companies to find new solutions, ideas,
alliances, technologies that will work better. That's the reason why those whose response to the current
crisis is to announce the end of capitalism are so misguided. Capitalism will survive. But it will not, and should
not, survive unchanged.¶ We went too far toward what the French called "hyper-capitalism" of creating markets that lack the kind of regulatory
mechanisms and social shock-absorbers that virtually all markets have had since the dawn of time. The idea of the completely free market is an
abstraction and a practical impossibility. Since the earliest days of capitalism the rights of market actors have been constrained to protect the
public good whether it was by laws enjoining dangerous behaviors or by requiring the a portion of profits go to the state to provide essential
services. In our recent past we not only ideologically tried to push back too far against those mechanisms that protect the public interest with
regard to markets but a number of revolutions made those mechanisms that did exist far less effective. ¶ Globalization
put many
corporate activities beyond the reach of national governments. New financial instruments grew so
complicated even sophisticated regulators couldn't understand them. New technologies added speed and volatility
to degrees that made it impossible for regulators to keep up. And that's only the story in financial markets. In other global markets the challenges
have been similarly great.¶ Now, in
order to compensate for these failures, we are going to enter an era in
which regulation is resurgent both at the national level and at the global level. New institutions will
have to be created to ensure that global markets serve the greater good and disruptions within
those markets do not produce unacceptable collateral damage to society. This is hardly the end of
capitalism. Rather it is simply the beginning of 21st Century global capitalism. It may be different from that
to which we have been accustomed for some time, but it will also be perhaps the single most important force defining the global era because it
will link nations and define necessary changes with a speed and force beyond the capabilities of any other global system (including government).
That can be a good thing, often will be, but we need to remember that capitalism is an amoral system and that a society without a moral basis is
unsustainable. That must come, at least in part, from government. In the century ahead, it must come in part from international as well as
traditional national mechanisms. Finding the balance between these new and historic forces will be one of the great challenges of the decades
ahead.
AT: Movements Coming/Solve
Movements will fail now.
Jones, Independent, 2011
[Owen, Masters at Oxford, named one of the Daily Telegraph's 'Top 100 Most Influential People on the
Left' for 2011, “Owen Jones: Protest without politics will change nothing”
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/owen-jones-protest-without-politics-will-changenothing-2373612.html]
My first experience of police kettling was aged 16. It was May
Day 2001, and the anti-globalisation movement was at
its peak. The turn-of-the-century anti-capitalist movement feels largely forgotten today, but it was a big deal at
the time. To a left-wing teenager growing up in an age of unchallenged neo-liberal triumphalism, just to have "anti-capitalism" flash up in the
headlines was thrilling. Thousands of apparently unstoppable protesters chased the world's rulers from IMF to World Bank summits – from
Seattle to Prague to Genoa – and the authorities were rattled.¶ Today,
as protesters in nearly a thousand cities across the
world follow the example set by the Occupy Wall Street protests, it's worth pondering what happened
to the anti-globalisation movement. Its activists did not lack passion or determination. But they did lack a coherent
alternative to the neo-liberal project. With no clear political direction, the movement was easily swept
away by the jingoism and turmoil that followed 9/11, just two months after Genoa.¶ Don't get me wrong: the Occupy movement is
a glimmer of sanity amid today's economic madness. By descending on the West's financial epicentres, it reminds us of how a crisis caused by
the banks (a sentence that needs to be repeated until it becomes a cliché) has been cynically transformed into a crisis of public spending. The
founding statement of Occupy London puts it succinctly: "We refuse to pay for the banks' crisis." The Occupiers direct their fire at the top 1 per
cent, and rightly so – as US billionaire Warren Buffett confessed: "There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making
war, and we're winning."¶ The Occupy movement has provoked fury from senior US Republicans such as Presidential contender Herman Cain
who – predictably – labelled it "anti-American". They're right to be worried: those camping outside banks threaten to refocus attention on the
real villains, and to act as a catalyst for wider dissent. But a coherent
alternative to the tottering global economic order
remains, it seems, as distant as ever. Neo-liberalism crashes around, half-dead, with no-one to
administer the killer blow.¶ There's always a presumption that a crisis of capitalism is good news for the
left. Yet in the Great Depression, fascism consumed much of Europe. The economic crisis of the 1970s
did lead to a resurgence of radicalism on both left and right. But, spearheaded by Thatcherism and Reaganism, the New Right
definitively crushed its opposition in the 1980s.This time round, there doesn't even seem to be an alternative for the
right to defeat. That's not the fault of the protesters. In truth, the left has never recovered from being
virtually smothered out of existence. It was the victim of a perfect storm: the rise of the New Right; neoliberal globalisation; and the repeated defeats suffered by the trade union movement.¶ But, above all, it
was the aftermath of the collapse of Communism that did for the left. As US neo-conservative Midge Decter
triumphantly put it: "It's time to say: We've won. Goodbye." From the British Labour Party to the African National
Congress, left-wing movements across the world hurtled to the right in an almost synchronised fashion.
It was as though the left wing of the global political spectrum had been sliced off. That's why, although
we live in an age of revolt, there remains no left to give it direction and purpose.¶ Much of the Occupy
movement's rank-and-file understandably wish to bypass a political process that seems either irrelevant or part of the problem. But the stakes
are far higher than they were during the heyday of the anti-globalisation movement. Capitalism
is in a crisis without apparent
end; Western governments are manically hacking chunks off the welfare state; and millions are being
stripped of secure futures. In these circumstances, anger will inevitably grow; but unless it is given a political focus, it is
set to erupt in ugly, directionless ways. We could be staring at a future of desperate youths rampaging
through city centres; and masked riot police officers charging at crowds. But those with economic and
political power would remain safely in place, possibly helped by an even greater backlash at rising
disorder than that witnessed after the August riots.¶ Those swelling the ranks of dissent have to choose: are we making a
point about the 1 per cent, or are we trying to dislodge them from power? We've certainly achieved the former. But – unless we develop
a coherent alternative that resonates with the millions being made to pay for the banks' crisis – the
people at the top aren't going anywhere.
EXTN – Link – Classism
Reclaiming the state is key.
Oksala, University of Helsinki philosophy and politics in feminist theory professor,
2011
[Johanna, Academy of Finland research project senior fellow, Constellations Volume 18, No 3, “Violence
and Neoliberal Governmentality” Wiley, p.476]
Many commentators now see the year 1979 when Foucault delivered his lecture series at¶ the Coll`ege de
France on neoliberal governmentality as the inauguration of the formal¶ period of the dominance of
neoliberal economic policy in Europe and the United States.8¶ Almost 30 years after its expanding
application, Foucault’s topic and his insights appear¶ farsighted, almost prophetic. His point in spending
so long on the analysis of the history¶ of neoliberalism was to show how it formed “his actuality.”9 He
was concerned about the¶ “state phobia” prevalent in the social critiques of his day. Similar to his aim in
The History¶ of Sexuality, vol. 1, which was to show that the fervent mission to liberate our repressed¶
sexuality was fundamentally misguided, he was again trying to show how the most popular¶ forms of
social and political critique were in fact attacking the wrong enemy: “What is¶ presently at issue in our
reality. . .is not so much the growth of the state. . .but much more¶ its reduction.”10 His problem was not
the unlimited growth of the state, its omnipotence or¶ its continuous and unified expansion. The risk was
not that the unlimited expansion of the¶ welfare state or the administrative apparatus on which it rested
would inevitably lead to a¶ totalitarian state like the Nazi or Stalinist state: “All those who share in the
great state phobia¶ should know that they are following the direction of the wind and that in fact, for
years and¶ years, an effective reduction of the state has been on the way.”11¶ Foucault criticised not only
the tendency to demonise the state in political thought – to see¶ it as the simple enemy and the root of all
political problems – but also the attempts to theorise¶ its essence: “The state is not a universal nor in itself
an autonomous source of power. . .the¶ state is nothing else but the mobile effect of a regime of multiple
governmentalities.”12 The¶ idea of governmentality thus radically historicises the state and dissolves its
fixed identity into¶ a multiplicity of institutions, procedures, analyses and reflection, calculations, and
tactics:¶ “The state is a practice. . .inseparable from the set of practices by which the state actually¶
became a way of governing, a way of doing things.13
Macro-theoretical approach is key.
Kellner, University of California Los Angeles philosophy of education chair, 2004
[Douglas, “Boundaries and Borderlines: Reflections on Jean Baudrillard and Critical Theory”
http://www.uta.edu/huma/illuminations/kell2.htm]
Against Foucault, Lyotard, and others who reject macro-theory, the category of totality, or metanarratives, I would argue that precisely now we need such totalizing theories to attempt to capture the new
totalizations being undertaken by capitalism in the realm of consumption, the media, information, etc.
Now, more than ever, we need macro-theories that will attempt to cognitively map the context of the new
forms of social development and the relationships between spheres like the economy, culture, education,
politics, etc. Furthermore, unlike Mark Poster (forthcoming) and others, I believe that it is a mistake to
sever the mode of information from the mode of production, and believe that there continues to be
"determination in the last instance" by the economic in the current stage of capitalism. Thus I would
propose that the new social conditions, new technological developments, and new political challenges
should be conceptualized in terms of a theory of techno-capitalism rather than postmodernism. With
Fredric Jameson (1984), I would propose that we are currently in a new configuration of capitalism where
postmodernism can be read as the cultural logic of capital but where the hegemony of capital is still the
fundamental principle of social organization and where capital attempts to control ever more domains of
life. I would, however, agree with those who claim that we need to rethink the problematics of radical
politics, of socialism or even radical social transformation or emancipation, in the light of the new social
conditions and challenges -- though I shall not address this issue here.
Reclaiming the state is necessary to wage class warfare.
Foucault, Director, Institute Francais at Hamburg, 1980
(MICHEL, POWER/KNOWLEDGE: SELECTED INTERVIEWS AND OTHER WRITINGS, 19721977, http://www.thefoucauldian.co.uk/bodypower.htm)
Your study is concentrated on all those micro-powers that are exercised at the level of daily life. Aren't you neglecting the State apparatus here?
It's true that since the late nineteenth century Marxist and 'Marxised' revolutionary movements have been given special importance to the State
apparatus as the stake of their struggle. What were the ultimate consequences of this? In order to be able to fight a State which is more than just a
government, the revolutionary movement must posses equivalent politico-military forces and hence must constitute itself as a party, organized
internally in the same way as a State apparatus with the same mechanisms of hierarchies and organization of powers. This consequence is heavy
with significance. Secondly, there is the question, much discussed within Marxism itself, of the capture of the State apparatus: should this be
considered as a straight forward take-over, accompanied by appropriate modifications, or should it be the opportunity for the destruction of that
apparatus? You know how the issue was finally settled. The
State apparatus must be undermined, but not completely
undermined, since the class struggle will not be brought to an immediate end without the
establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Hence the State apparatus must be kept
sufficiently intact for it to be employed against the class enemy. So we reach a second consequence: during the
period of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the State apparatus must to some extent at least be maintained. Finally then, as a third
consequence, in order to operate these State apparatuses which have been taken over but both destroyed, it will be
necessary to have recourse to technicians and specialists. And in order to do this one has to call upon the old class
which is acquainted with the apparatus, namely the bourgeoisie.
They ignore material suffering by leaving the levers of power in the hands of the
right – turns their impact and causes dehumanization.
West, Georgetown law professor, 2006
[Robin, Harvard Journal of law and gender vol 29, “Desperately Seeking a Moralist”,
http://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1277&context=facpub, p.12-3]
So what is the loss in all of this? I think we are all paying the price, but the damage is the greatest on what passes for the academic legal
The left, in law and elsewhere, becomes unwilling to speak in any direct way about the
quality of peopl e ' s lives, rather than about their relative position on varying poles of
subordination. It becomes willfully incapacitated from the work of sparking sympathetic responses in listeners regarding undue or
unnecessary human suffering that might prompt a felt imperative to act to reduce it. It has no way of countering the
almost numbing effect of the r ight ' s rhetorical commitment to the individual and corporate "liberties" that c r e a t e the
left.
conditions that induce human suffering. I t becomes incapable of understanding or communicating the narratives of those who are living
out their lives in those conditions. I t has no way of r e sponding. to the chilling and thanatos-like compulsion (to us e a Freudian
cliche of my own) on the mainstream and "new" right to reduce people's lives, histories, fates, passions, and connections to a corporate
balance sheet of costs and bene f i t s - a
compulsion that de-humanizes and can prove lethal. Pe rhaps mos t
importantly, without a hedonic focus on harm, injury, and human suffering, the left becomes incapable of responding to
or even conceptualizing the sufferings occasioned not by overtly coercive forms of oppression
(such as slavery or rape), but by transactions and ways of life that are fully consensual (such as wage labor) and justified by what I
elsewhere call an "ethic of consent": a general, across-the-board claim that anything to which an individual has rendered consent must,
for that reason alone, be productive of "va lue " and mus t therefore be "good." It is left with no response to the insularity of the forces
in our current culture that render the undue sufferings of people a function of ways of life that are created as well as justified by the
i r "consensuality," rather than by caste or rank ordering. Precisely
at that point - a t the point where the left has
essentially no counter to the "ethic of cons ent " that insulates capitalism, much of patriarchy, a
lot of contemporary white racism, and much else even from critique, much less r e form- the "
l e f t " becomes something other than radical and something othe r than critical. What i t i s -wha t
the academic left is discursively reduced to once it abandons interest in the quality of people's l ive s - i s a
mechanistic, mind-bogglingly redundant, and almost absurdly abstract set of claims about structures of
oppression and inequality as revealed through deconstructive readings of various texts. Its
"politics" are reduced to an empty (or worse) valorization of an equally abstract "empowerment" likewise revealed, or
not, in texts. In Caring for Justice, I made the much more particular claim that less politically powerful persons and groups that suffer
relatively unrecognized, not well understood, and unarticulated harms, who as a consequence are living out lives that are to varying
degrees invisible as well as lesser (including poor people, women, non-whites, and many others), disproportionately suffer the
consequences of this tectonic shift in our habits of thought. 37 Put the marginality of the concept of harm in the academic-like
critique of law that considers i t s e l f in any way political together with the marginality of the harms suffered disproportionately by
Gendered harms, raced harms, harms of poverty, and so
on are marginalized within our understanding of harm, which is i t s e l f marginalized within
consequentialist approaches to law and its creation and reform, which are themselves marginalized in
subordinated groups, and you get a pretty toxic brew.
mainstream legal thought and thoroughly disparaged in progressive thinking. So, for all of these reasons, the harms that women
disproportionately sustain are at the edges of legal consciousness. They are way out there, furthermore, well before we go about the
discomfiting business of factoring in the conflicting interests of powerful people who have a stake in trivializing or denying their
seriousness.
Capitalism deploys micropolitics to replace places lifestyle and consumption as its
substitute which allows for continued exploitation.
Ebert, State University of New York Albany cultural theory professor, 2005
[Teresa, Science & Society 69.1, “Rematerializing Feminism” Academic Search Complete, p.33-55]
The emergence of micropolitics marks the impact of the globalization of capitalist production and the way
that the dimensions of this objective reality have become less and less graspable by a subject who,
through the working of ideology, has been remapped as the subject of desire. The subject of desire is, by
its very formation, a local and localist subject. This desiring subject grasps the world through its identity
and furthermore constructs this identity through the satisfactions that it acquires in its consuming relations
to the world around it. Micropolitics is the politics of consumption, and consumption is always a matter of
localities. Micropolitics does not have an inverse relation to universal objective reality, but rather is
complementary to it: it preoccupies the subject with the here and now and, in doing so, distracts its
attention from the all encompassing objective reality that in fact determines the here and now. Advanced
capitalism deploys micropolitics to restrict the access of the subject to the dynamics of traveling capital
and its expanding range of exploitation. It is of course ironic that micropolitics is seen as enabling politics
- a politics that attends to the connections and relations of the subject with its immediate conditions and
serves as the basis for coalition and other local practices. In fact, micropolitics has become the logic of
activism in the new social movements. To say what I have said in a different way: micropolitics is the
politics of bypassing class and putting in its place lifestyle and consumption. It is a politics that erases any
examination of the structures of exploitation, substituting instead ethnographical studies of the behavior
of the subject in its multiple consuming relations.
Capitalism continues to play a major structuring principle in society – their attempt
to denounce macro-social theory in favor of micro-politics demonstrates this
misunderstanding and rejects Marxist understandings of the world.
Kellner, University of California Los Angeles philosophy of education chair, 2004
[Douglas, “Boundaries and Borderlines: Reflections on Jean Baudrillard and Critical Theory”
http://www.uta.edu/huma/illuminations/kell2.htm]
The attempts of New French Theory, however, to conceptualize these new phenomena in terms of a
"post," and often anti-Marxian discourse and framework, however, are highly problematical as is their
frequent denunciation of macro-social theory in favor of micro theory and politics (this is particularly true
of Lyotard, Deleuze and Guattari, and others). It is my view that New French Theorists like Baudrillard,
Lyotard and Foucault have made a serious theoretical and political mistake in severing their work from
the Marxian critique of capitalism precisely at a point when the logic of capital has been playing an
increasingly important role in structuring the new stage of society which I conceptualize as a new stage of
capitalism -- capitalism as techno-capital (Kellner 1989a). Indeed, I would argue that Marxian categories
are of central importance precisely in analyzing the phenomena focused on by Baudrillard and New
French Theory: the consumer society, the media, information, computers, etc. For it is capitalism that is
determining what sort of media, information, computers, etc. are being produced and distributed precisely
according to their logic and interests. That is, in techno-capitalist societies, information, as Herbert
Schiller and others have shown, is being more and more commodified, accessible only to those who can
pay for it and who have access to it. Education itself is becoming more and more commodified as
computers become more essential to the process of education, while more and more domains of
knowledge and information are commodified and transmitted through computers (I'm thinking both of
computer learning programs which force consumers to buy programs to learn typing, math, history,
foreign languages, etc. as well as modem-programs and firms like Compu-Serve which make access an
abundance of information, entertainment, networking, etc. via computer for those who can afford to pay
its per minute information prices).
***Postmodernism***
Frontline – PoMo
The world is getting better slowly but steadily.
Beauchamp, Think Progress, 12-11-13
[Zack, “5 Reasons Why 2013 Was The Best Year In Human”
http://thinkprogress.org/security/2013/12/11/3036671/2013-certainly-year-human-history/]
Between the brutal civil war in Syria, the government shutdown and all of the deadly dysfunction it represents, the NSA spying revelations, and
massive inequality, it’d be easy to for you to enter 2014 thinking the last year has been an awful one.¶ But you’d be wrong. We have every
reason to believe that 2013
was, in fact, the best year on the planet for humankind.¶ Contrary to what you might have
heard, virtually all of the most important forces that determine what make people’s lives good — the things
that determine how long they live, and whether they live happily and freely — are trending in an extremely happy direction.
While it’s possible that this progress could be reversed by something like runaway climate change, the effects will
have to be dramatic to overcome the extraordinary and growing progress we’ve made in making the
world a better place.¶ Here’s the five big reasons why.¶ 1. Fewer people are dying young, and more are living
longer.¶ India Polio¶ CREDIT: AP PHOTO/MAHESH KUMAR¶ The greatest story in recent human history is the simplest:
we’re winning the fight against death. “There is not a single country in the world where infant or child
mortality today is not lower than it was in 1950,” writes Angus Deaton, a Princeton economist who
works on global health issues.¶ The most up-to-date numbers on global health, the 2013 World Health Organization (WHO)
statistical compendium, confirm Deaton’s estimation. Between 1990 and 2010, the percentage of children who died before their fifth
birthday dropped by almost half. Measles deaths declined by 71 percent, and both tuberculosis and maternal deaths by half again. HIV, that
modern plague, is also being held back, with deaths from AIDS-related illnesses down by 24 percent since 2005.¶ In short, fewer people are
dying untimely deaths. And that’s
not only true in rich countries: life expectancy has gone up between 1990 and
2011 in every WHO income bracket. The gains are even more dramatic if you take the long view: global life expectancy was 47 in
the early 1950s, but had risen to 70 — a 50 percent jump — by 2011. For even more perspective, the average Briton in 1850 — when the British
Empire had reached its apex — was 40. The average person today should expect to live almost twice as long as the average citizen of the
world’s wealthiest and most powerful country in 1850.¶ In real terms, this means millions of fewer dead adults and children a year, millions
fewer people who spend their lives suffering the pains and unfreedoms imposed by illness, and millions more people spending their twilight
years with loved ones. And the trends are all positive — “progress has accelerated in recent years in many countries with the highest rates of
mortality,” as the WHO rather bloodlessly put it.¶ What’s going on? Obviously, it’s fairly complicated, but the
most important drivers
have been technological and political innovation. The Enlightenment-era advances in the scientific
method got people doing high-quality research, which brought us modern medicine and the information
technologies that allow us to spread medical breakthroughs around the world at increasingly faster
rates. Scientific discoveries also fueled the Industrial Revolution and the birth of modern capitalism,
giving us more resources to devote to large-scale application of live-saving technologies. And the global
spread of liberal democracy made governments accountable to citizens, forcing them to attend to their
health needs or pay the electoral price.¶ We’ll see the enormously beneficial impact of these two forces, technology and
democracy, repeatedly throughout this list, which should tell you something about the foundations of human progress. But when talking about
improvements in health, we shouldn’t neglect foreign aid. Nations donating huge amounts of money out of an altruistic interest in the welfare
of foreigners is historically unprecedented, and while not all aid has been helpful, health aid has been a huge boon.¶ Even Deaton, who wrote
one of 2013′s harshest assessments of foreign aid, believes “the case for assistance to fight disease such as HIV/AIDS or smallpox is strong.”
That’s because these programs have demonstrably saved lives — the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), a 2003 program
pushed by President Bush, paid for anti-retroviral treatment for over 5.1 million people in the poor countries hardest-hit by the AIDS epidemic.¶
So we’re
outracing the Four Horseman, extending our lives faster than pestilence, war, famine, and death can take them. That
alone should be enough to say the world is getting better.¶ 2. Fewer people suffer from extreme
poverty, and the world is getting happier.¶ APTOPIX India Maha Kumbh¶ CREDIT: SAURABH DAS/AP PHOTO¶ There are
fewer people in abject penury than at any other point in human history, and middle class people enjoy
their highest standard of living ever. We haven’t come close to solving poverty: a number of African countries in
particular have chronic problems generating growth, a nut foreign aid hasn’t yet cracked. So this
isn’t a call for complacency about
poverty any more than acknowledging victories over disease is an argument against tackling malaria. But make no mistake: as a
whole, the world is much richer in 2013 than it was before.¶ 721 million fewer people lived in extreme
poverty ($1.25 a day) in 2010 than in 1981, according to a new World Bank study from October. That’s
astounding — a decline from 40 to about 14 percent of the world’s population suffering from abject
want. And poverty rates are declining in every national income bracket: even in low income countries, the
percentage of people living in extreme poverty ($1.25 a day in 2005 dollars) a day gone down from 63 in 1981 to 44 in 2010.¶ We can be fairly
confident that these trends are continuing. For one thing, they survived the Great Recession in 2008. For another, the decline in poverty has
been fueled by global economic growth, which looks to be continuing: global GDP grew by 2.3 percent in 2012, a number that’ll rise to 2.9
percent in 2013 according to IMF projections.¶ The bulk of the recent decline in poverty comes form India and China — about 80 percent from
China *alone*. Chinese economic and social reform, a delayed reaction to the mass slaughter and starvation of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, has
been the engine of poverty’s global decline. If you subtract China, there are actually more poor people today than there were in 1981
(population growth trumping the percentage declines in poverty).¶ But we shouldn’t discount China. If what we care about is fewer people
suffering the misery of poverty, then it shouldn’t matter what nation the less-poor people call home. Chinese growth should be celebrated, not
shunted aside.¶ The
poor haven’t been the only people benefitting from global growth. Middle class people
have access to an ever-greater stock of life-improving goods. Televisions and refrigerators, once luxury goods, are now
comparatively cheap and commonplace. That’s why large-percentage improvements in a nation’s GDP appear to correlate strongly with higher
levels of happiness among the nation’s citizens; people like having things that make their lives easier and more worry-free.¶ Global economic
growth in the past five decades has dramatically reduced poverty and made people around the world happier. Once again, we’re better off.¶
3. War is becoming rarer and less deadly.¶ APTOPIX Mideast Libya¶ CREDIT: AP PHOTO/ MANU BRABO¶ Another massive
conflict could overturn the global progress against disease and poverty. But it appears war, too, may be losing its fangs.¶ Steven Pinker’s
2011 book The Better Angels Of Our Nature is the gold standard in this debate. Pinker brought a treasure trove of
data to bear on the question of whether the world has gotten more peaceful, and found that, in the long arc of
human history, both war and other forms of violence (the death penalty, for instance) are on a
centuries-long downward slope.¶ Pinker summarizes his argument here if you don’t own the book. Most eye-popping are
the numbers for the past 50 years; Pinker finds that “the worldwide rate of death from interstate and
civil war combined has juddered downward…from almost 300 per 100,000 world population during
World War II, to almost 30 during the Korean War, to the low teens during the era of the Vietnam War,
to single digits in the 1970s and 1980s, to less than 1 in the twenty-first century.” Here’s what that looks like
graphed:¶ Pinker¶ CREDIT: STEVEN PINKER/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL¶ So it looks like the smallest percentage of humans alive
since World War II, and in all likelihood in human history, are living through the horrors of war. Did 2013 give us any reason
to believe that Pinker and the other scholars who agree with him have been proven wrong?¶ Probably not. The academic debate over the
decline of war really exploded in 2013, but the “declinist” thesis has fared pretty well. Challenges
to Pinker’s conclusion that battle
deaths have gone down over time have not withstood scrutiny. The most compelling critique, a new paper by Bear F. Braumoeller,
argues that if you control for the larger number of countries in the last 50 years, war happens at roughly the same rates as it has historically.¶
There are lots of things you might say about Braumoeller’s argument, and I’ve asked Pinker for his two cents (update: Pinker’s response here).
But most importantly, if battle deaths per 100,000 people really has declined, then his argument doesn’t mean very much. If
(percentagewise) fewer people are dying from war, then what we call “war” now is a lot less deadly than “war” used
to be. Braumoeller suggests population growth and improvements in battle medicine explain the decline, but that’s not convincing: tell me
with a straight face that the only differences in deadliness between World War II, Vietnam, and the wars you see today is that there are more
people and better doctors.¶ There’s a more rigorous way of putting that: today,
we see many more civil wars than we do
wars between nations. The former tend to be less deadly than the latter. That’s why the other major challenge to Pinker’s
thesis in 2013, the deepening of the Syrian civil war, isn’t likely to upset the overall trend. Syria’s war is an unimaginable
tragedy, one responsible for the rare, depressing increase in battle deaths from 2011 to 2012. However, the overall 2011-2012 trend
“fits well with the observed long-term decline in battle deaths,” according to researchers at the
authoritative Uppsala Conflict Data Program, because the uptick is not enough to suggest an overall
change in trend. We should expect something similar when the 2013 numbers are published.¶ Why are smaller and smaller percentages
of people being exposed to the horrors of war? There are lots of reasons one could point to, but two of the biggest ones are the spread of
democracy and humans getting, for lack of a better word, better.¶ That democracies never, or almost never, go to war with each other is not
seriously in dispute: the statistical evidence is ridiculously strong. While some argue that the “democratic peace,” as it’s called, is caused by
things other than democracy itself, there’s
good experimental evidence that democratic leaders and citizens just
don’t want to fight each other.¶ Since 1950, democracy has spread around the world like wildfire. There
were only a handful of democracies after World War II, but that grew to roughly 40 percent of all by the end of the Cold War. Today, a
comfortable majority — about 60 percent — of all states are democracies. This freer world is also a safer one.¶ Second — and this is Pinker’s
preferred explanation — people have developed strategies for dealing with war’s causes and consequences. “Human ingenuity and experience
have gradually been brought to bear,” Pinker writes, “just as they have chipped away at hunger and disease.” A series of human inventions,
things like U.N. peacekeeping operations, which nowadays are very successful at reducing violence, have given us a set of social tools
increasingly well suited to reducing the harm caused by armed conflict.¶ War’s decline isn’t accidental, in other words. It’s by design.¶
4.
Rates of murder and other violent crimes are in free-fall.¶ Britain Unrest¶ CREDIT: AKIRA SUEMORI/AP PHOTOS¶
Pinker’s trend against violence isn’t limited just to war. It seems likes crimes, both of the sort states
commit against their citizens and citizens commit against each other, are also on the decline.¶ Take a few
examples. Slavery, once commonly sanctioned by governments, is illegal everywhere on earth. The use of torture as legal
punishment has gone down dramatically. The European murder rate fell 35-fold from the Middle Ages to
the beginning of the 20th century (check out this amazing 2003 paper from Michael Eisner, who dredged up medieval records to
estimate European homicide rates in the swords-and-chivalry era, if you don’t believe me).¶ The decline has been especially marked in recent
years. Though homicide crime rates climbed back up from their historic lows between the 1970s and 1990s, reversing progress made since the
late 19th century, they have collapsed worldwide in the 21st century. 557,000
people were murdered in 2001 — almost
three times as many as were killed in war that year. In 2008, that number was 289,000, and the
homicide rate has been declining in 75 percent of nations since then.¶ Statistics from around the developed world,
where numbers are particularly reliable, show that it’s not just homicide that’s on the wane: it’s almost all violent
crime. US government numbers show that violent crime in the United States declined from a peak of about 750 crimes per 100,000
Americans to under 450 by 2009. G7 as a whole countries show huge declines in homicide, robbery, and vehicle theft.¶ So even in countries
that aren’t at poor or at war, most people’s lives are getting safer and more secure. Why?¶ We know it’s not incarceration. While the United
States and Britain have dramatically increased their prison populations, others, like Canada, the Netherlands, and Estonia, reduced their
incarceration rates and saw similar declines in violent crime. Same thing state-to-state in the United States; New York imprisoned fewer people
and saw the fastest crime decline in the country.¶ The Economist’s deep dive into the explanations for crime’s collapse provides a few answers.
Globally, police have gotten better at working with communities and targeting areas with the most crime. They’ve also gotten new toys, like
DNA testing, that make it easier to catch criminals.¶ The crack epidemic in the United States and its heroin twin in Europe have both slowed
down dramatically. Rapid gentrification has made inner-city crime harder. And the increasing cheapness of “luxury” goods like iPods and DVD
players has reduced incentives for crime on both the supply and demand sides: stealing a DVD player isn’t as profitable, and it’s easier for a
would-be thief to buy one in the first place.¶ But there’s one explanation The Economist dismissed that strikes me as hugely important: the
abolition of lead gasoline. Kevin
Drum at Mother Jones wrote what’s universally acknowledged to be the
definitive argument for the lead/crime link, and it’s incredibly compelling. We know for a fact that lead
exposure damages people’s brains and can potentially be fatal; that’s why an international campaign to
ban leaded gasoline started around 1970. Today, leaded gasoline is almost unheard of — it’s banned in 175
countries, and there’s been a decline in lead blood levels by about 90 percent.¶ Drum marshals a wealth of evidence that the
parts of the brain damaged by lead are the same ones that check people’s aggressive impulses. Moreover,
the timing matches up: crime shot up in the mid-to-late-20th century as cars spread around the world, and started to decline in the 70s as the
anti-lead campaign was succeeding. Here’s close the relationship is, using data from the United States:¶ Lead_Crime_325¶ Now, non-homicide
violent crime appears to have ticked up in 2012, based on U.S. government surveys of victims of crime, but it’s
very possible that’s
just a blip: the official Department of Justice report says up-front that “the apparent increase in the rate of violent crimes reported to police
from 2011 to 2012 was not statistically significant.Ӧ So we have no reason to believe crime is making a come back, and every reason to believe
the historical decline in criminal violence is here to stay.¶
5. There’s less racism, sexism, and other forms of
discrimination in the world.¶ Nelson Mandela¶ CREDIT: THEANA CALITZ/AP IMAGES¶ Racism, sexism, anti-Semitism,
homophobia, and other forms of discrimination remain, without a doubt, extraordinarily powerful
forces. The statistical and experimental evidence is overwhelming — this irrefutable proof of widespread discrimination against AfricanAmericans, for instance, should put the “racism is dead” fantasy to bed.¶ Yet the need to combat discrimination denial shouldn’t blind us to
the good news. Over the centuries, humanity has made extraordinary progress in taming its hate for and ill-
treatment of other humans on the basis of difference alone. Indeed, it is very likely that we live in the
least discriminatory era in the history of modern civilization. It’s not a huge prize given how bad the past
had been, but there are still gains worth celebrating.¶ Go back 150 years in time and the point should be
obvious. Take four prominent groups in 1860: African-Americans were in chains, European Jews were routinely
massacred in the ghettos and shtetls they were confined to, women around the world were denied the opportunity to work outside the home
and made almost entirely subordinate to their husbands, and LGBT people were invisible. The improvements in each of these group’s statuses
today, both in the United States and internationally, are incontestable. ¶ On closer look, we
have reason to believe the happy
trends are likely to continue. Take racial discrimination. In 2000, Harvard sociologist Lawrence Bobo
penned a comprehensive assessment of the data on racial attitudes in the United States. He found a
“national consensus” on the ideals of racial equality and integration. “A nation once comfortable as a
deliberately segregationist and racially discriminatory society has not only abandoned that view,” Bobo
writes, “but now overtly positively endorses the goals of racial integration and equal treatment. There is
no sign whatsoever of retreat from this ideal, despite events that many thought would call it into
question. The magnitude, steadiness, and breadth of this change should be lost on no one.Ӧ The norm
against overt racism has gone global. In her book on the international anti-apartheid movement in the 1980s, Syracuse’s Audie
Klotz says flatly that “the illegitimacy of white minority rule led to South Africa’s persistent diplomatic, cultural, and economic isolation.” The
belief that racial discrimination could not be tolerated had become so widespread, Klotz argues, that it united the globe — including
governments that had strategic interests in supporting South Africa’s whites — in opposition to apartheid. In 2011, 91 percent of respondents
in a sample of 21 diverse countries said that equal treatment of people of different races or ethnicities was important to them.¶ Racism
obviously survived both American and South African apartheid, albeit in more subtle, insidious forms.
“The death of Jim Crow racism has left us in an uncomfortable place,” Bobo writes, “a state of laissez-faire racism” where racial discrimination
and disparities still exist, but support for the kind of aggressive government policies needed to address them is racially polarized. But
there’s reason to hope that’ll change as well: two massive studies of the political views of younger
Americans by my TP Ideas colleagues, John Halpin and Ruy Teixeira, found that millenials were
significantly more racially tolerant and supportive of government action to address racial disparities
than the generations that preceded them. Though I’m not aware of any similar research of on a global scale, it’s hard not to
imagine they’d find similar results, suggesting that we should have hope that the power of racial prejudice may be waning.¶ The story
about gender discrimination is very similar: after the feminist movement’s enormous victories in the
20th century, structural sexism still shapes the world in profound ways, but the cause of gender equality
is making progress. In 2011, 86 percent of people in a diverse 21 country sample said that equal
treatment on the basis of gender was an important value. The U.N.’s Human Development Report’s
Gender Inequality Index — a comprehensive study of reproductive health, social empowerment, and
labor market equity — saw a 20 percent decline in observable gender inequalities from 1995 to 2011.
IMF data show consistent global declines in wage disparities between genders, labor force participation, and
educational attainment around the world. While enormous inequality remains, 2013 is looking to be the worst year for sexism in history.¶
Finally, we’ve made astonishing progress on sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination —
largely in the past 15 years. At the beginning of 2003, zero Americans lived in marriage equality states;
by the end of 2013, 38 percent of Americans will. Article 13 of the European Community Treaty bans discrimination on the
grounds of sexual orientation, and, in 2011, the UN Human Rights Council passed a resolution committing the council to documenting and
exposing discrimination on orientation or identity grounds around the world. The public
opinion trends are positive
worldwide: all of the major shifts from 2007 to 2013 in Pew’s “acceptance of homosexuality” poll were
towards greater tolerance, and young people everywhere are more open to equality for LGBT individuals than their older peers.¶
best_year_graphics-04¶ Once again, these victories are partial and by no means inevitable. Racism, sexism,
homophobia, and other forms of discrimination aren’t just “going away” on their own. They’re losing
their hold on us because people are working to change other people’s minds and because governments
are passing laws aimed at promoting equality. Positive trends don’t mean the problems are close to
solved, and certainly aren’t excuses for sitting on our hands.¶ That’s true of everything on this list. The fact that fewer people are dying from
war and disease doesn’t lessen the moral imperative to do something about those that are; the fact that people are getting richer and safer in
their homes isn’t an excuse for doing more to address poverty and crime.¶ But too often, the worst parts about the world are treated as
inevitable, the prospect of radical victory over pain and suffering dismissed as utopian fantasy. The overwhelming force of the evidence shows
that to be false. As best we can tell, the reason humanity is getting better is because humans have decided to make the world a better place.
We consciously chose to develop lifesaving medicine and build freer political systems; we’ve passed laws against workplace discrimination and
poisoning children’s minds with lead.¶ So far, these choices have more than paid off. It’s up to us to make sure they continue to.
Critical intellectuals need to use the state as a counterhegemonic strategy of
emancipation.
Richard Jones, Aberystwyth International politics professor, 1999, Security, Strategy, and Critical
Theory, http://www.ciaonet.org/book/wynjones/wynjones06.html
The central political task of the intellectuals is to aid in the construction of a counterhegemony
and thus undermine the prevailing patterns of discourse and interaction that make up the
currently dominant hegemony. This task is accomplished through educational activity, because, as Gramsci argues, “every
relationship of ‘hegemony’ is necessarily a pedagogic relationship” (Gramsci 1971: 350). Discussing the relationship of the
“philosophy of praxis” to political practice, Gramsci claims: It [the theory] does not tend to leave the “simple”
in their primitive philosophy of common sense, but rather to lead them to a higher conception of life. If it affirms the need for contact
between intellectuals and “simple” it is not in order to restrict scientific activity and preserve unity at the low level of the masses, but
precisely in
order to construct an intellectual–moral bloc which can make politically possible the
intellectual progress of the mass and not only of small intellectual groups. (Gramsci 1971: 332–333)
According to Gramsci, this attempt to construct an alternative “intellectual–moral bloc” should take place under the auspices of the
Communist Party—a body he described as the “modern prince.” Just as Niccolò Machiavelli hoped to see a prince unite Italy, rid the country
of foreign barbarians, and create a virtù–ous state, Gramsci believed that the modern prince could lead the working class on its journey
toward its revolutionary destiny of an emancipated society (Gramsci 1971: 125–205). Gramsci’s relative optimism about the possibility of
progressive theorists playing a constructive role in emancipatory political practice was predicated on his belief in the existence of a universal
class (a class whose emancipation would inevitably presage the emancipation of humanity itself) with revolutionary potential. It was a
gradual loss of faith in this axiom that led Horkheimer and Adorno to their extremely pessimistic prognosis about the possibilities of
progressive social change. But does a loss of faith in the revolutionary vocation of the proletariat necessarily lead to the kind of quietism
ultimately embraced by the first generation of the Frankfurt School? The conflict that erupted in the 1960s between them and their more
radical students suggests not. Indeed, contemporary critical theorists claim that the deprivileging of the role of the proletariat in the struggle
for emancipation is actually a positive move. Class remains a very important axis of domination in society, but it is not the only such axis
(Fraser 1995). Nor is it valid to reduce all other forms of domination—for example, in the case of gender—to class relations, as orthodox
Marxists tend to do. To recognize these points is not only a first step toward the development of an analysis of forms of exploitation and
exclusion within society that is more attuned to social reality; it is also a realization that there are other forms of emancipatory politics than
those associated with class conflict. 1 This in turn suggests new possibilities and problems for emancipatory theory. Furthermore, the
abandonment of faith in revolutionary parties is also a positive development. The history of the European left during the twentieth century
provides myriad examples of the ways in which the fetishization of party organizations has led to bureaucratic immobility and the confusion
of means with ends (see, for example, Salvadori 1990). The failure of the Bolshevik experiment illustrates how disciplined, vanguard parties
are an ideal vehicle for totalitarian domination (Serge 1984). Faith in the “infallible party” has obviously been the source of strength and
comfort to many in this period and, as the experience of the southern Wales coalfield demonstrates, has inspired brave and progressive
behavior (see, for example, the account of support for the Spanish Republic in Francis 1984). But such parties have so often been the
enemies of emancipation that they should be treated with the utmost caution. Parties are necessary, but their fetishization is potentially
disastrous. History furnishes examples of progressive developments that have been positively influenced by organic intellectuals operating
outside the bounds of a particular party structure (G. Williams 1984). Some of these developments have occurred in the particularly
intractable realm of security. These examples may be considered as “resources of hope” for critical security studies (R. Williams 1989). They
illustrate that ideas are important or, more correctly, that change is the product of the dialectical interaction of ideas and material reality.
One clear security–related example of the role of critical thinking and critical thinkers in aiding
and abetting progressive social change is the experience of the peace movement of the 1980s. At
that time the ideas of dissident defense intellectuals (the “alternative defense” school) encouraged and drew
strength from peace activism. Together they had an effect not only on short–term policy but on
the dominant discourses of strategy and security, a far more important result in the long run.
The synergy between critical security intellectuals and critical social movements and the
potential influence of both working in tandem can be witnessed particularly clearly in the fate of
common security. As Thomas Risse–Kappen points out, the term “common security” originated in the contribution of peace
researchers to the German security debate of the 1970s (Risse–Kappen 1994: 186ff.); it was subsequently popularized by the Palme
Commission report (Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues 1982). Initially, mainstream defense intellectuals
dismissed the concept as hopelessly idealistic; it certainly had no place in their allegedly hardheaded and realist view of the world. However,
notions of common security were taken up by a number of different intellectual communities, including the liberal arms control community
in the United States, Western European peace researchers, security specialists in the center–left political parties of Western Europe, and
Soviet “institutchiks”—members of the influential policy institutes in the Soviet Union such as the United States of America and Canada
Institute (Landau 1996: 52–54; Risse–Kappen 1994: 196–200; Kaldor 1995; Spencer 1995). These communities were subsequently able to
take advantage of public pressure exerted through social movements in order to gain broader acceptance for common security. In Germany,
for example, “in response to social movement pressure, German social organizations such as churches and trade unions quickly supported the
ideas promoted by peace researchers and the SPD” (Risse–Kappen 1994: 207). Similar pressures even had an effect on the Reagan
administration. As Risse–Kappen notes:
When the Reagan administration brought hard–liners into power, the US arms control community
was removed from policy influence. It was the American peace movement and what became known as the “freeze campaign” that revived the
arms control process together with pressure from the European allies. (Risse–Kappen 1994: 205; also Cortright 1993: 90–110) Although it
would be difficult to sustain a claim that the combination of critical movements and intellectuals persuaded the Reagan government to adopt
the rhetoric and substance of common security in its entirety, it
is clear that it did at least have a substantial impact
on ameliorating U.S. behavior. The most dramatic and certainly the most unexpected impact of
alternative defense ideas was felt in the Soviet Union. Through various East–West links, which
included arms control institutions, Pugwash conferences, interparty contacts, and even direct
personal links, a coterie of Soviet policy analysts and advisers were drawn toward common
security and such attendant notions as “nonoffensive defense” (these links are detailed in Evangelista 1995;
Kaldor 1995; Checkel 1993; Risse–Kappen 1994; Landau 1996 and Spencer 1995 concentrate on the role of the Pugwash conferences).
This group, including Palme Commission member Georgii Arbatov, Pugwash attendee Andrei Kokoshin, and Sergei Karaganov, a
senior adviser who was in regular contact with the Western peace researchers Anders Boserup and Lutz Unterseher (Risse–Kappen 1994:
203), then influenced Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev’s subsequent championing of common security may be
attributed to several factors. It is clear, for example, that new Soviet leadership had a strong interest in alleviating tensions in East–West
relations in order to facilitate much–needed domestic reforms (“the interaction of ideas and material reality”). But what is significant is that
the Soviets’ commitment to common security led to significant changes in force sizes and
postures. These in turn aided in the winding down of the Cold War, the end of Soviet
domination over Eastern Europe, and even the collapse of Russian control over much of the
territory of the former Soviet Union. At the present time, in marked contrast to the situation in the early 1980s, common
security is part of the common sense of security discourse. As MccGwire points out, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) (a
common defense pact) is using the rhetoric of common security in order to justify its expansion into Eastern Europe (MccGwire 1997). This
points to an interesting and potentially important aspect of the impact of ideas on politics. As concepts such as common security, and
collective security before it (Claude 1984: 223–260), are adopted by governments and military services, they inevitably become somewhat
debased. The hope is that enough of the residual meaning can survive to shift the parameters of the debate in a potentially progressive
direction. Moreover, the adoption of the concept of common security by official circles provides critics with a useful tool for (immanently)
The example of common
security is highly instructive. First, it indicates that critical intellectuals can be politically engaged
and play a role—a significant one at that—in making the world a better and safer place. Second, it
points to potential future addressees for critical international theory in general, and critical
security studies in particular. Third, it also underlines the role of ideas in the evolution of society. Critical Security Studies and
critiquing aspects of security policy (as MccGwire 1997 demonstrates in relation to NATO expansion).
the Theory–Practice Nexus Although most proponents of critical security studies reject aspects of Gramsci’s theory of organic intellectuals,
in particular his exclusive concentration on class and his emphasis on the guiding role of the party, the desire for engagement and relevance
must remain at the heart of their project. The example of the peace movement suggests that critical theorists can still play the role of organic
intellectuals and that this organic relationship need not confine itself to a single class; it can involve alignment with different coalitions of
social movements that campaign on an issue or a series of issues pertinent to the struggle for emancipation (Shaw 1994b; R. Walker 1994).
Edward Said captures this broader orientation when he suggests that critical intellectuals “are always tied to and ought to remain an organic
part of an ongoing experience in society: of the poor, the disadvantaged, the voiceless, the unrepresented, the powerless” (Said 1994: 84). In
the specific case of critical security studies, this means placing the experience of those men and women and communities for whom the
present world order is a cause of insecurity rather than security at the center of the agenda and making suffering humanity rather than raison
d’état the prism through which problems are viewed. Here the project stands full–square within the critical theory tradition. If “all theory is
for someone and for some purpose,” then critical security studies is for “the voiceless, the unrepresented, the powerless,” and its purpose is
their emancipation. The theoretical implications of this orientation have already been discussed in the previous chapters. They involve a
fundamental reconceptualization of security with a shift in referent object and a broadening of the range of issues considered as a legitimate
part of the discourse. They also involve a reconceptualization of strategy within this expanded notion of security. But the
question
remains at the conceptual level of how these alternative types of theorizing—even if they are
self–consciously aligned to the practices of critical or new social movements, such as peace activism, the
struggle for human rights, and the survival of minority cultures—can become “a force for the direction of action.”
Again, Gramsci’s work is insightful. In the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci advances a sophisticated analysis of how dominant discourses play a
vital role in upholding particular political and economic orders, or, in Gramsci’s terminology, “historic blocs” (Gramsci 1971: 323–377).
Gramsci adopted Machiavelli’s view of power as a centaur, half man, half beast: a mixture of consent and coercion. Consent is produced and
reproduced by a ruling hegemony that holds sway through civil society and through which ruling or dominant ideas become widely
dispersed. 2 In particular, Gramsci describes how ideology becomes sedimented in society and takes on the status of common sense; it
becomes subconsciously accepted and even regarded as beyond question. Obviously, for Gramsci, there is nothing immutable about the
values that permeate society; they can and do change. In the social realm, ideas and institutions that were once seen as natural and beyond
question (i.e., commonsensical) in the West, such as feudalism and slavery, are now seen as anachronistic, unjust, and unacceptable. In
Gramsci’s intention is to harness this potential for
change and ensure that it moves in the direction of emancipation. To do this he suggests a
strategy of a “war of position” (Gramsci 1971: 229–239). Gramsci argues that in states with developed
civil societies, such as those in Western liberal democracies, any successful attempt at progressive social change
requires a slow, incremental, even molecular, struggle to break down the prevailing hegemony
and construct an alternative counterhegemony to take its place. Organic intellectuals have a
crucial role to play in this process by helping to undermine the “natural,” “commonsense,”
internalized nature of the status quo. This in turn helps create political space within which
alternative conceptions of politics can be developed and new historic blocs created. I contend that
Marx’s well–worn phrase, “All that is solid melts into the air.”
Gramsci’s strategy of a war of position suggests an appropriate model for proponents of critical security studies to adopt in relating their
theorizing to political practice. The Tasks of Critical Security Studies If the project of critical security studies is conceived in terms of a
war of position, then the
main task of those intellectuals who align themselves with the enterprise is to
attempt to undermine the prevailing hegemonic security discourse. This may be accomplished
by utilizing specialist information and expertise to engage in an immanent critique of the
prevailing security regimes, that is, comparing the justifications of those regimes with actual
outcomes. When this is attempted in the security field, the prevailing structures and regimes are found to fail grievously on their own
terms. Such an approach also involves challenging the pronouncements of those intellectuals, traditional or organic, whose views serve to
legitimate, and hence reproduce, the prevailing world order. This challenge entails teasing out the often subconscious and certainly
unexamined assumptions that underlie their arguments while drawing attention to the normative viewpoints that are smuggled into
mainstream thinking about security behind its positivist facade. In this sense, proponents of critical security studies approximate to
Foucault’s notion of “specific intellectuals” who use their expert knowledge to challenge the prevailing “regime of truth” (Foucault 1980:
132). However, critical theorists might wish to reformulate this sentiment along more familiar Quaker lines of “speaking truth to power” (this
sentiment is also central to Said 1994) or even along the eisteddfod lines of speaking “truth against the world.” Of course, traditional
strategists can, and indeed do, sometimes claim a similar role. Colin S. Gray, for example, states that “strategists must be
prepared to ‘speak truth to power’” (Gray 1982a: 193). But the difference between Gray and proponents of critical security studies is that,
whereas the former seeks to influence policymakers in particular directions without questioning the basis of their power, the latter aim at a
thoroughgoing critique of all that traditional security studies has taken for granted. Furthermore, critical theorists base their critique on the
presupposition, elegantly stated by Adorno, that “the need to lend suffering a voice is the precondition of all truth” (cited in Jameson 1990:
66). The aim of critical security studies in attempting to undermine the prevailing orthodoxy is ultimately educational. As Gramsci notes,
“Every relationship of ‘hegemony’ is necessarily a pedagogic relationship” (Gramsci 1971: 350; see also the discussion of critical pedagogy
in Neufeld 1995: 116–121). Thus, by criticizing the hegemonic discourse and advancing alternative conceptions of security based on
different understandings of human potentialities, the approach is simultaneously playing a part in eroding the legitimacy of the ruling historic
bloc and contributing to the development of a counterhegemonic position. There are a number of avenues open to critical security specialists
in pursuing this educational strategy. As teachers, they can try to foster and encourage skepticism toward accepted wisdom and open minds
to other possibilities. They can also take advantage of the seemingly unquenchable thirst of the media for instant punditry to forward
alternative views onto a broader stage. Nancy Fraser argues: “As teachers, we try to foster an emergent pedagogical counterculture.... As
critical public intellectuals we try to inject our perspectives into whatever cultural or political public spheres we have access to” (Fraser
1989: 11). Perhaps significantly, support for this type of emancipatory strategy can even be found in the work of the ultrapessimistic
Adorno, who argues:
In the history of civilization there have been not a few instances when delusions were healed not by focused
propaganda, but, in the final analysis, because scholars, with their unobtrusive yet insistent work habits, studied what lay at the root of the
delusion. (cited in Kellner 1992: vii) Such “unobtrusive yet insistent work” does not in itself create the social change to which Adorno
alludes. The
conceptual and the practical dangers of collapsing practice into theory must be
guarded against. Rather, through their educational activities, proponents of critical security studies
should aim to provide support for those social movements that promote emancipatory social
change. By providing a critique of the prevailing order and legitimating alternative views,
critical theorists can perform a valuable role in supporting the struggles of social movements.
That said, the role of theorists is not to direct and instruct those movements with which they are aligned; instead, the relationship is
reciprocal. The experience of the European, North American, and Antipodean peace movements of the 1980s shows how influential social
movements can become when their efforts are harnessed to the intellectual and educational activity of critical thinkers. For example, in his
account of New Zealand’s antinuclear stance in the 1980s, Michael C. Pugh cites the importance of the visits of critical intellectuals such as
Helen Caldicott and Richard Falk in changing the country’s political climate and encouraging the growth of the antinuclear movement (Pugh
1989: 108; see also Cortright 1993: 5–13). In the 1980s peace movements and critical intellectuals interested in issues of security and
strategy drew strength and succor from each other’s efforts. If such critical social movements do not exist, then this creates obvious
difficulties for the critical theorist. But even under these circumstances, the theorist need not abandon all hope of an eventual orientation
toward practice. Once again, the peace movement of the 1980s provides evidence of the possibilities. At that time, the movement benefited
from the intellectual work undertaken in the lean years of the peace movement in the late 1970s. Some of the theories and concepts
developed then, such as common security and nonoffensive defense, were eventually taken up even in the Kremlin and played a significant
role in defusing the second Cold War. Those ideas developed in the 1970s can be seen in Adornian terms of a “message in a bottle,” but in
this case, contra Adorno’s expectations, they were picked up and used to support a program of emancipatory political practice. Obviously,
one would be naive to understate the difficulties facing those attempting to develop alternative critical approaches within academia. Some of
these problems have been alluded to already and involve the structural constraints of academic life itself. Said argues that many problems are
caused by what he describes as the growing “professionalisation” of academic life (Said 1994: 49–62). Academics are now so constrained by
the requirements of job security and marketability that they are extremely risk–averse. It pays—in all senses—to stick with the crowd and
avoid the exposed limb by following the prevalent disciplinary preoccupations, publish in certain prescribed journals, and so on. The result is
the navel gazing so prevalent in the study of international relations and the seeming inability of security specialists to deal with the changes
brought about by the end of the Cold War (Kristensen 1997 highlights the search of U.S. nuclear planners for “new targets for old
weapons”). And, of course, the pressures for conformism are heightened in the field of security studies when governments have a very real
interest in marginalizing dissent. Nevertheless, opportunities
for critical thinking do exist, and this thinking
can connect with the practices of social movements and become a “force for the direction of
action.” The experience of the 1980s, when, in the depths of the second Cold War, critical thinkers risked demonization and in some
countries far worse in order to challenge received wisdom, thus arguably playing a crucial role in the very survival
of the human race, should act as both an inspiration and a challenge to critical security studies.
EXTN – Uniqueness – Pomo
World is getting better – 2013 was the best year on the planet – every metric goes
[insert side], people are living longer, less people are experiencing war, the world is
richer, and less people face discrimination and more feel empowered – that’s
Beauchamp. Prefer it – our ev takes into account their args – their ev cites
snapshots, our cites trends and has recency.
Squo is structurally improving – multiple indicators.
Lomborg, Copenhagen Business School professor, 10-16-13
[Bjorn, “A Better World Is Here” http://www.project-syndicate.org/print/bj-rn-lomborgon-the-decliningcosts-of-global-problems]
For centuries, optimists and pessimists have argued over the state of the world. Pessimists see a world
where more people means less food, where rising demand for resources means depletion and war, and,
in recent decades, where boosting production capacity means more pollution and global warming. One of
the current generation of pessimists’ sacred texts, The Limits to Growth, influences the environmental movement to this day.¶ The
optimists, by contrast, cheerfully claim that everything – human health, living standards, environmental
quality, and so on – is getting better. Their opponents think of them as “cornucopian” economists, placing their faith in the
market to fix any and all problems.¶ But, rather than picking facts and stories to fit some grand narrative of decline
or progress, we should try to compare across all areas of human existence to see if the world really is
doing better or worse. Together with 21 of the world’s top economists, I have tried to do just that,
developing a scorecard spanning 150 years. Across ten areas – including health, education, war, gender,
air pollution, climate change, and biodiversity – the economists all answered the same question: What
was the relative cost of this problem in every year since 1900, all the way to 2013, with predictions to
2050.¶ Using classic economic valuations of everything from lost lives, bad health, and illiteracy to wetlands destruction and increased
hurricane damage from global warming, the economists show how much each problem costs. To estimate the magnitude of the problem, it is
compared to the total resources available to fix it. This gives us the problem’s size as a share of GDP. And the trends since 1900 are sometimes
surprising.¶ Consider
gender inequality. Essentially, we were excluding almost half the world’s population from production. In
1900, only 15% of the global workforce was female. What is the loss from lower female workforce participation? Even
taking into account that someone has to do unpaid housework and the increased costs of female
education, the loss was at least 17% of global GDP in 1900. Today, with higher female participation and
lower wage differentials, the loss is 7% – and projected to fall to 4% by 2050.¶ It will probably come as a big
surprise that climate change is expected to be mostly an increasing net benefit – rising to about 1.5% of GDP per year – in the period from 1900
to 2025. This is because global warming has mixed effects; for moderate warming, the benefits prevail.¶ On one hand, because CO2 works as a
fertilizer, higher levels have been a boon for agriculture, which comprises the biggest positive impact, at 0.8% of GDP. Likewise, moderate
warming prevents more cold deaths than the number of extra heat deaths that it causes. It also reduces demand for heating more than it
increases the costs of cooling, implying a gain of about 0.4% of GDP. On the other hand, warming increases water stress, costing about 0.2% of
GDP, and negatively affects ecosystems like wetlands, at a cost of about 0.1%.¶ As temperatures rise, however, the costs will rise and the
benefits will decline, leading to a dramatic reduction in net benefits. After
the year 2070, global warming will become a net
cost to the world, justifying cost-effective climate action now and in the decades to come.¶ Yet, to put
matters in perspective, the scorecard also shows us that the world’s biggest environmental problem by
far is indoor air pollution. Today, indoor pollution from cooking and heating with bad fuels kills more than three
million people annually, or the equivalent of a loss of 3% of global GDP. But in 1900, the cost was 19% of GDP, and it is expected to
drop to 1% of GDP by 2050.¶ Health indicators worldwide have shown some of the largest improvements.
Human life expectancy barely changed before the late eighteenth century. Yet it is difficult to overstate
the magnitude of the gain since 1900: in that year, life expectancy worldwide was 32 years, compared to
69 now (and a projection of 76 years in 2050).¶ The biggest factor was the fall in infant mortality. For
example, even as late as 1970, only around 5% of infants were vaccinated against measles, tetanus,
whooping cough, diphtheria, and polio. By 2000, it was 85%, saving about three million lives annually –
more, each year, than world peace would have saved in the twentieth century.¶ This success has many parents. The Gates Foundation and the
GAVI Alliance have spent more than $2.5 billion and promised another $10 billion for vaccines. Efforts by the Rotary Club, the World Health
Organization, and many others have reduced polio by 99% worldwide since 1979.¶ In
economic terms, the cost of poor health
at the outset of the twentieth century was an astounding 32% of global GDP. Today, it is down to about
11%, and by 2050 it will be half that.¶ While the optimists are not entirely right (loss of biodiversity in the
twentieth century probably cost about 1% of GDP per year, with some places losing much more), the overall picture is clear. Most
of the topics in the scorecard show improvements of 5-20% of GDP. And the overall trend is even
clearer. Global problems have declined dramatically relative to the resources available to tackle them.¶ Of
course, this does not mean that there are no more problems. Although much smaller, problems in health, education, malnutrition, air pollution,
gender inequality, and trade remain large.¶ But realists
should now embrace the view that the world is doing much
better. Moreover, the scorecard shows us where the substantial challenges remain for a better 2050. We
should guide our future attention not on the basis of the scariest stories or loudest pressure groups, but on objective assessments of where we
can do the most good.
EXTN – Links – PoMo
Utopianism isn’t a viable political strategy engagement with nitty-gritty details is
most effective – framework internal link turns the aff.
James Ferguson, Department of Anthropology, Stanford University, “The Uses of Neoliberalism,”
Antipode Vol. 41 No. S1 ‘9 ISSN 0066-4812, pp 166–184
If we are seeking, as this special issue of Antipode aspires to do, to link our critical analyses to the world of grounded political
struggle—not only to interpret the world in various ways, but also to change it —then there is much to be
said for focusing , as I have here, on mundane, real- world debates around policy and politics, even if doing
so inevitably puts us on the compromised and reformist terrain of the possible, rather than the seductive
high ground of revolutionary ideals and utopian desires But I would also insist that there is more at stake in the examples
I have discussed here than simply a slightly better way to ameliorate the miseries of the chronically poor, or a
technically superior method for relieving the suffering of famine victims.¶ My point in discussing the South African BIG campaign, for
instance, is not really to argue for its implementation. There is much in the campaign that is appealing, to be sure. But one can just as easily identify a series of worries
that would bring the whole proposal into doubt. Does not, for instance, the decoupling of the question of assistance from the issue of labor, and the associated
valorization of the “informal”, help provide a kind of alibi for the failures of the South African regime to pursue policies that would do more to create jobs? Would not
the creation of a basic income benefit tied to national citizenship simply exacerbate the vicious xenophobia that already divides the South African poor, ¶ in a context
where many of the poorest are not citizens, and would thus not be eligible for the BIG? Perhaps even more fundamentally, is the idea of basic income really capable of
commanding the mass support that alone could make it a central pillar of a new approach to distribution? The record to date gives powerful reasons to doubt it. So far,
the technocrats’ dreams of relieving poverty through efficient cash transfers have attracted little support from actual poor people, who seem to find that vision a bit
pale and washed out, compared with the vivid (if vague) populist promises of jobs and personalistic social inclusion long offered by the ANC patronage machine, and
lately personified by Jacob Zuma (Ferguson forthcoming). ¶ My real interest in the policy proposals discussed here, in fact, has little to do with the narrow policy
questions to which they seek to provide answers. For what is most significant, for my purposes, is not whether or not these are good policies, but the way that they
illustrate a process through which specific
governmental devices and modes of reasoning that we have become used to
associating with a very particular (and conservative) political agenda (“neoliberalism”) may be in the process of
being peeled away from that agenda, and put to very different uses. Any progressive who takes seriously
the challenge I pointed to at the start of this essay, the challenge of developing new progressive arts of government, ought to
find this turn of events of considerable interest.¶ As Steven Collier (2005) has recently pointed out, it is important to
question the assumption that there is, or must be, a neat or automatic fit between a hegemonic “neoliberal”
political-economic project (however that might be characterized), on the one hand, and specific
“neoliberal” techniques, on the other. Close attention to particular techniques (such as the use of
quantitative calculation, free choice, and price driven by supply and demand) in particular settings (in Collier’s case, fiscal and budgetary
reform in post-Soviet Russia) shows that the relationship between the technical and the political-economic “is much
more polymorphous and unstable than is assumed in much critical geographical work”, and that neoliberal technical
mechanisms are in fact “deployed in relation to diverse political projects and social norms” (2005:2).¶ As I
suggested in referencing the role of statistics and techniques for pooling risk in the creation of social democratic welfare states, social technologies need
not have any essential or eternal loyalty to the political formations within which they were first developed.
Insurance rationality at the end of the nineteenth century had no essential vocation to provide security and solidarity to the working class; it was turned to that purpose
Specific ways of solving or
posing governmental problems, specific institutional and intellectual mechanisms, can be combined in an
almost infinite variety of ways, to accomplish different social ends. With social, as with any other sort of
technology, it is not the machines or the mechanisms that decide what they will be used to do.¶ Foucault
(in some substantial measure) because it was available, in the right place at the right time, to be appropriated for that use.
(2008:94) concluded his discussion of socialist government- ality by insisting that the answers to the Left’s governmental problems require not yet another search
through our sacred texts, but a process of conceptual and institutional innovation. “[I]f there is a really socialist governmentality, then it is not hidden within socialism
and its texts. It cannot be deduced from them. It must be invented”. But invention in the domain of governmental technique is rarely something worked up out of
whole cloth. More often, it involves a kind of bricolage (Le ́vi- Strauss 1966), a piecing together of something new out of scavenged parts originally intended for some
other purpose. As we pursue such a process of improvisatory invention, we might begin by making an inventory of the parts available for such tinkering, keeping all
If we can go beyond
seeing in “neoliberalism” an evil essence or an automatic unity, and instead learn to see a field of specific
governmental techniques, we may be surprised to find that some of them can be repurposed, and put
to work in the service of political projects very different from those usually associated with that word.
the while an open mind about how different mechanisms might be put to work, and what kinds of purposes they might serve.
If so, we may find that the cabinet of governmental arts available to us is a bit less bare than first
appeared, and that some rather useful little mechanisms may be nearer to hand than we thought.
Becoming more ethical subjects doesn’t change the world.
Chandler, University of Westminster international relations professor, 2007
[David, “The Attraction of Post-Territorial Politics: Ethics and Activism in the International Sphere”
http://www.davidchandler.org/pdf/short_articles/Inaugural%20lecture.pdf, p.6-7]
Today more and more people are ‘doing politics’ in their academic work. This is the reason for the boom
in International Relations study and the attraction of other social sciences to the global sphere. I would
argue that the attraction of IR for many people has not been IR theory but the desire to practice global
ethics. The boom in the IR discipline has coincided with a rejection of Realist theoretical frameworks of
power and interests and the sovereignty/anarchy problematic. However, I would argue that this
rejection has not been a product of theoretical engagement with Realism but an ethical act of rejection
of Realism’s ontological focus.¶ It seems that our ideas and our theories say much more about us than
the world we live in. Normative theorists and Constructivists tend to support the global ethical turn
arguing that we should not be as concerned with ‘what is’ as with the potential for the emergence of
global ethical community. Constructivists, in particular, focus upon the ethical language which political
elites espouse rather than the practices of power. But the most dangerous trends in the discipline today
are those frameworks which have taken up Critical theory and argue that focusing on the world as it
exists is conservative ‘problem-solving’ while the task for critical theorists is to focus on emancipatory
alternative forms of living or of thinking about the world. Critical thought then becomes a process of
wishful thinking rather than one of engagement, with its advocates arguing that we need to focus on
clarifying our own ethical frameworks and biases and positionality before thinking about or teaching on
world affairs; in the process this becomes ‘me-search’ rather than research. We have moved a long way
from Hedley Bull’s perspective that, for academic research to be truly radical, we had to put our values
to the side to follow where the question or inquiry might lead.¶ The inward-looking and narcissistic
trends in academia, where we are more concerned with our ‘reflectivity’ – the awareness of our own
ethics and values - than with engaging with the world, was brought home to me when I asked my IR
students which theoretical frameworks they agreed with most and they replied mostly Critical theory
and Constructivism despite the fact that they thought that states operated on the basis of power and
self-interest in a world of anarchy. Their theoretical preferences were based more on what their choices
said about them as ethical individuals than about how theory might be used to understand and engage
with the world.
Rethinking is futile – it is a desire for nothing to change.
Prozorov, University of Helsinki international relations professor, 2007
[Sergei, “The World Community and the Closure of the Political: How to Overcome Carl Schmitt”
http://turin.sgir.eu/uploads/Prozorov-prozorov_world_community_2007.pdf, p.1]
Contemporary political theory exhibits a curious attachment to its central concepts, which increasingly
function as markers of theoretical battlefields, having long ceased to refer to anything unequivocal but rather denoting an intense degree of
equivocation and even antagonism. ‘Essentially
contested’, these concepts nonetheless remain too valuable for
the critical discourse to be ‘abandoned to the enemy’, as Slavoj Zizek suggests we do with the ‘discredited’ concept of
democracy.1 Yet, this very example proves that despite the utmost heterogeneity of e.g. Jacques Derrida’s, Chantal Mouffe’s or Jacques
Ranciere’s theories of democracy to its dominant ‘operative concept’, the concept
itself is not abandoned in critical
discourse but rather permanently ‘rethought’, ‘redefined’, ‘reconstructed’, etc. This stubborn
commitment to contested concepts is particularly interesting in the light of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s claim
that the philosophy is the ‘art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts’.2 It is notable that this definition explicitly prioritises novelty over
transformation, advocating forming and inventing rather than re-forming and re-inventing concepts, as is the case with the essentially contested
concepts of today’s political theory. Perhaps, the
desire to rethink is a symptom of the paradoxical and parasitical
dependence of the critical discourse on what it attempts to transcend, a symptom that reveals the
disavowed desire for things to remain the same, so that an innocent game of rethinking may safely go
on against the background of the stable immutability of what is rethought.3 Moreover, the tireless drive
to rethink contested concepts itself functions as the best demonstration of the utmost difficulty, if not
the futility, of this enterprise, insofar as no end to this process is visible or even imaginable.
Their approach to politics is utopian – that creates the conditions for the possibility
of infinite deferability.
Rasch, Indiana University Germanic studies professor, 2003
[William, Cultural Critique No. 54 Spring, “Human Rights as Geopolitics: Carl Schmitt and the Legal Form
of American Supremacy” Jstor, p.143-4]
But while affirmative theorists like Habermas and Rawls are busy constructing the ideological scaffolding that supports the structure of the
status quo, what
role is there for the "critical" theorist to play? Despite the sanguine hopes of Hardt and Negri
(2000) that "Empire" will all but spontaneously combust as a result of the irrepressible ur-desire of
the multitude, can we seriously place our faith in some utopian grand alternative anymore, or in
some revolutionary or therapeutic result based on the truth of critique that would allow us all, in
the end, to sing in the sunshine and laugh everyday? Do, in fact, such utopian fantasies not lead to
the moralizing hubris of a Rawls or a Habermas?16 In short, it is one thing to recognize the concealed,
particular interests that govern the discourse and politics of human rights and quite another to
think seriously about how things could be different, to imagine an international system that respected both the
equality and the difference of states and/or peoples. Is it possible-and this is Todorov's question-to value Vitoria's principle of the "free
circulation of men, ideas, and goods" and still also "cherish another principle, that of self-determination and noninterference" (Todorov
1984, 177)? The entire "Vitorian" tradition, from Scott to Habermas and Rawls, thinks not. Habermas, for instance, emphatically endorses
the fact that "the erosion of the principle of nonintervention in recent decades has been due primarily to the politics of human rights"
(1998, 147), a "normative" achievement that is not so incidentally correlated with a positive, economic fact: "In view of the subversive
forces and imperatives of the world market and of the increasing density of worldwide networks of communication and commerce, the
external sovereignty of states, however it may be grounded, is by now in any case an anachronism" (150). And opposition to this
development is not merely anachronistic; it is illegitimate, not to be tolerated. So, for those who sincerely believe in American institutional,
cultural, and moral superiority, the times could not be rosier. After all, when push comes to shove, "we" decide-not only about which
societies are decent and which ones are not, but also about which acts of violence are "terrorist" and which compose the "gentle
What, however, are those "barbarians" who disagree with the new world order
supposed to do? With Agamben, they could wait for a "completely new politics" to come, but the
contours of such a politics are unknown and will remain unknown until the time of its arrival. And
that time, much like the second coming of Christ, seems infinitely deferrable. While they wait far the
compulsion" of a "just war."
Benjaminian "divine violence" to sweep away the residual effects of the demonic rule of law (Benjamin 1996, 248-52), the barbarians might
be tempted to entertain Schmitt's rather forlorn fantasy of an egalitarian balance of power. Yet if the old, inner-European balance of power
rested on an asymmetrical exclusion of the non-European world, it must be asked: what new exclusion will be necessary for a new balance,
and is that new exclusion tolerable? At the moment, there is no answer to this question, only a precondition to an answer. If one wishes to
entertain Todorov's challenge of thinking both equality and difference, universal commerce of people and ideas as well as selfdetermination and nonintervention, then the concept of humanity must once again become the invisible and unsurpassable horizon of
discourse, not its positive pole. The word "human," to evoke one final distinction, must once again become descriptive of a "fact" and not a
"value." Otherwise, whatever else it may be, the search for "human" rights will always also be the negative image of the relentless search
for the "inhuman" other.
***Environment***
Frontline – Environment
The environment is sustainable and trending positively.
Lomborg, Copenhagen Business School professor, 10-16-13
[Bjorn, “A Better World Is Here” http://www.project-syndicate.org/print/bj-rn-lomborgon-the-decliningcosts-of-global-problems]
For centuries, optimists and pessimists have argued over the state of the world. Pessimists see a world
where more people means less food, where rising demand for resources means depletion and war, and,
in recent decades, where boosting production capacity means more pollution and global warming. One of
the current generation of pessimists’ sacred texts, The Limits to Growth, influences the environmental movement to this day.¶ The
optimists, by contrast, cheerfully claim that everything – human health, living standards, environmental
quality, and so on – is getting better. Their opponents think of them as “cornucopian” economists, placing their faith in the
market to fix any and all problems.¶ But, rather than picking facts and stories to fit some grand narrative of decline
or progress, we should try to compare across all areas of human existence to see if the world really is
doing better or worse. Together with 21 of the world’s top economists, I have tried to do just that,
developing a scorecard spanning 150 years. Across ten areas – including health, education, war, gender,
air pollution, climate change, and biodiversity – the economists all answered the same question: What
was the relative cost of this problem in every year since 1900, all the way to 2013, with predictions to
2050.¶ Using classic economic valuations of everything from lost lives, bad health, and illiteracy to wetlands destruction and increased
hurricane damage from global warming, the economists show how much each problem costs. To estimate the magnitude of the problem, it is
compared to the total resources available to fix it. This gives us the problem’s size as a share of GDP. And the trends since 1900 are sometimes
surprising.¶ Consider
gender inequality. Essentially, we were excluding almost half the world’s population from production. In
1900, only 15% of the global workforce was female. What is the loss from lower female workforce participation? Even
taking into account that someone has to do unpaid housework and the increased costs of female
education, the loss was at least 17% of global GDP in 1900. Today, with higher female participation and
lower wage differentials, the loss is 7% – and projected to fall to 4% by 2050.¶ It will probably come as a big
surprise that climate change is expected to be mostly an increasing net benefit – rising to about 1.5% of GDP per year – in the period from 1900
to 2025. This is because global warming has mixed effects; for moderate warming, the benefits prevail.¶ On one hand, because CO2 works as a
fertilizer, higher levels have been a boon for agriculture, which comprises the biggest positive impact, at 0.8% of GDP. Likewise, moderate
warming prevents more cold deaths than the number of extra heat deaths that it causes. It also reduces demand for heating more than it
increases the costs of cooling, implying a gain of about 0.4% of GDP. On the other hand, warming increases water stress, costing about 0.2% of
GDP, and negatively affects ecosystems like wetlands, at a cost of about 0.1%.¶ As temperatures rise, however, the costs will rise and the
benefits will decline, leading to a dramatic reduction in net benefits. After
the year 2070, global warming will become a net
cost to the world, justifying cost-effective climate action now and in the decades to come.¶ Yet, to put
matters in perspective, the scorecard also shows us that the world’s biggest environmental problem by
far is indoor air pollution. Today, indoor pollution from cooking and heating with bad fuels kills more than three
million people annually, or the equivalent of a loss of 3% of global GDP. But in 1900, the cost was 19% of
GDP, and it is expected to drop to 1% of GDP by 2050.¶ Health indicators worldwide have shown some
of the largest improvements. Human life expectancy barely changed before the late eighteenth century.
Yet it is difficult to overstate the magnitude of the gain since 1900: in that year, life expectancy
worldwide was 32 years, compared to 69 now (and a projection of 76 years in 2050).¶ The biggest factor
was the fall in infant mortality. For example, even as late as 1970, only around 5% of infants were vaccinated
against measles, tetanus, whooping cough, diphtheria, and polio. By 2000, it was 85%, saving about
three million lives annually – more, each year, than world peace would have saved in the twentieth century.¶ This success has many
parents. The Gates Foundation and the GAVI Alliance have spent more than $2.5 billion and promised another $10 billion for vaccines. Efforts
by the Rotary Club, the World Health Organization, and many others have reduced polio by 99% worldwide since 1979.¶ In
economic
terms, the cost of poor health at the outset of the twentieth century was an astounding 32% of global
GDP. Today, it is down to about 11%, and by 2050 it will be half that.¶ While the optimists are not
entirely right (loss of biodiversity in the twentieth century probably cost about 1% of GDP per year, with some places losing much more),
the overall picture is clear. Most of the topics in the scorecard show improvements of 5-20% of GDP.
And the overall trend is even clearer. Global problems have declined dramatically relative to the
resources available to tackle them.¶ Of course, this does not mean that there are no more problems. Although much smaller,
problems in health, education, malnutrition, air pollution, gender inequality, and trade remain large.¶ But realists should now
embrace the view that the world is doing much better. Moreover, the scorecard shows us where the
substantial challenges remain for a better 2050. We should guide our future attention not on the basis of the scariest stories
or loudest pressure groups, but on objective assessments of where we can do the most good.
Engaging the state is environmental solutions – collective actions are key, not naïve
apolitical individualization.
Maniates, Professor of Political Science and Environmental Science at Allegheny
College, 1
(Michael, “Individualization: Plant a Tree, Buy a Bike, Save the World?,” Global Environmental Politics
1:3, August 2001, http://merlin.allegheny.edu/employee/m/mmaniate/savetheworld.pdf, page 32-33)
And yet mainstream environmentalism has not always advanced an individualized consumeristic strategy
for redressing environmental ills. Even during the turn of the last century, a time of zealous rediscovery of
the wonders of efficiency and scientific management, “the dynamics of conservation,” observes famed
environmental historian Samuel P. Hays, “with its tension between the centralizing tendencies of system
and expertise on the one hand and the decentralization of localism on the other . . .” fueled healthy debate
over the causes of and cures for environmental ills.19 Throughout the 20th century, in fact,
mainstream environmentalism has demonstrated an ability to foster multiple and simultaneous
interpretations on where we are and where we are heading. ¶ But that ability has, today, clearly
become impaired. Although public support for things environmental has never been greater, it is
so because the public increasingly understands environmentalism as an individual, rational,
cleanly apolitical process that can deliver a future that works without raising voices or mobilizing
constituencies. As individual consumers and recyclers we are supplied with ample and easy means
of “doing our bit.” The result, though, is often dissonant and sometimes bizarre: consumers wearing
“save the earth” T-shirts, for example, speak passionately against recent rises in gasoline prices
when approached by television news crews; shoppers drive all over town in their gasoline- guzzling
SUVs in search of organic lettuce or shade-grown coffee; and diligent recyclers expend far more
fossil-fuel energy on the hot water spent to meticulously clean a tin can than is saved by its
recycling.¶ Despite these jarring contradictions, the technocratic, sanitary and individualized
framing of environmentalism prevails, largely because it is continually reinforced. Consider, for
example, recent millennial issues of Time and Newsweek that look to life in the future.20 They paint
a picture of smart appliances, computer-guided automobiles, clean neighborhoods, eco-friendly
energy systems, and happy citizens. How do we get to this future? Not through bold political
leadership or citizen-based debate within enabling democratic institutions— but rather via
consumer choice: informed, decentralized, apolitical, individualized. Corporations will build a
better mousetrap, consumers will buy it, and society will be transformed for the better. A strugglefree eco-revolution awaits, one made possible by the combination of technological innovation and
consumer choice with a conscience.¶ The “better mousetrap theory of social change” so prevalent in
these popular news magazines was coined by Langdon Winner, a political-science professor and
expert on technological politics, who first introduced the term in an essay on the demise of the
appropriate technology movement of the 1970s.21 Like the militant recyclers and dead-serious green
consumers of today, appropriate technologists of the 1970s were the standard bearers for the
individualization of responsibility. The difference between then and now is that appropriate technology
lurked at the fringes of a 1970s American environmental politics more worried about corporate
accountability than consumer choice. Today, green consumption, recycling and Cuisinart-socialchange occupy the heart of US ecopolitics. Both then and now, such individualization is alarming,
for as Winner notes:¶ The inadequacies of such ideas are obvious. Appropriate technologists were
unwilling to face squarely the facts of organized social and political power. Fascinated by dreams of
a spontaneous, grass-roots revolution, they avoided any deep-seeking analysis of the institutions
that control the direction of technological and economic development. In this happy self-confidence
they did not bother to devise strategies that might have helped them overcome obvious sources of
resistance. The same judgment that Marx and Engels passed on the utopians of the nineteenth
century apply just as well to the appropriate technologists of the 1970s: they were lovely visionaries,
naive about the forces that confronted them.22
EXTN – Uniqueness – Environment
World is getting better – every metric goes [insert side], and so does consensus –
poverty is decreasing, the world is getting healthier, and global warming won’t be a
cost to the world until 2070 because of adaptation and mitigation, and air pollution
is the world’s biggest threat and is declining as such – that’s Lomberg. Prefer it –
our ev takes into account their args – their ev cites snapshots, our cites trends and
has recency.
Trends all go aff – the environment is sustainable.
Ellis, Associate Professor, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, 12
(Erle, Winter, “The Planet of No Return,” http://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/journal/past-issues/issue2/the-planet-of-no-return/)
Over the last several decades, a
consensus has grown among scientists that humans have become the dominant
ecological force on the planet. According to these scientists, we are now living in the Anthropocene, a new
geological epoch shaped by humans.1 While some have hailed this forward-looking vision of the planet, others have linked
this view with the perennial concern that human civilization has exceeded the carrying capacity of Earth's
natural systems and may thus be fundamentally unsustainable.2 In this article, I argue that this latter notion rests
upon a series of assumptions that are inconsistent with contemporary science on how humans interact
with ecosystems, as well as with most historical and archeological evidence.¶ Ever since early humans
discovered fire and the benefits of collaborative systems such as collective hunting and social learning, human
systems, not the classic biophysical limits that still constrain other species, have set the wider envelope
for human population growth and prosperity. It was not planetary boundaries, but human system
boundaries that constrained human development in the Holocene, the geological epoch that we have just left. We should expect
no less in the Anthropocene.¶ Humans have dramatically altered natural systems -- converting forests to farmlands,
damming rivers, driving some species to extinction and domesticating others, altering the nitrogen and carbon
cycles, and warming the globe -- and yet the Earth has become more productive and more capable of
supporting the human population.3 This process has dramatically intensified in recent centuries at a rate
unprecedented in Earth's (and human) history,4 but there is little evidence to date that this dynamic has been
fundamentally altered. While the onset of the Anthropocene carries new ecological and social risks, human systems such as
agriculture have proven extraordinarily resilient to environmental and social challenges, responding
robustly to population pressures, soil exhaustion, and climate fluctuations over millennia, from a global
perspective.¶ Though the sustainability of human civilization may not be at stake, we must still take our responsibilities as planetary stewards
more seriously than ever. As the scale and power of human systems continue to increase at accelerating rates, we are awakening to a new world
of possibilities -- some of them frightening. And yet our
unprecedented and growing powers also allow us the
opportunity to create a planet that is better for both its human and nonhuman inhabitants. It is an opportunity
that we should embrace.¶ 1.¶ Long before the Holocene, Paleolithic human systems had already evolved powers beyond
those of any other species, managing to engineer ecosystems using fire, to innovate collective strategies
for hunting, and to develop other tools and techniques that revolutionized human livelihoods from hunting and
foraging.5 The extinction of megafauna across most of the terrestrial biosphere demonstrates the unprecedented success of
early human engineering of ecosystems.6 Those extinctions had cascading effects (trophic downscaling) caused by the loss of
dominant species, leading to forest loss in some regions and forest regrowth in others.7 Paleolithic humans, with a population of just a few
million, dramatically transformed ecosystems across most of the terrestrial biosphere and most coastal
ecosystems,8 demonstrating that population size is not the main source of the transformative power of human systems. ¶ The onset of the
Holocene, which began with the end of the last ice age, roughly corresponds with the start of the Neolithic Age of human development. During
this period, agricultural human systems began to displace earlier Paleolithic human systems,9 and human systems became dependent upon the
entirely novel, unambiguously anthropogenic process of clearing native vegetation and herbivores and replacing them with engineered
ecosystems populated by domesticated plant and animal species.10 This process allowed available land and resources to support many more
people and set the stage for massive and sustained human population growth way beyond what was possible by Paleolithic systems. In
ten
millennia, the human population surged from just a few million to billions today.11¶ While the warm and stable
climate of the Holocene is widely credited with enabling the rise of agriculture, more complex forms of human social organization, and the
general thriving of human populations to a degree far exceeding that of the prior epoch, it was not these new climatic and biophysical conditions
themselves that brought the Paleolithic era to an end. Rather, Paleolithic human systems failed to compete with a new human system built upon a
series of profound technological innovations in ecosystem engineering.12 ¶ The
dramatic, sustained rise of agricultural
populations, along with their eventual success in dominating Earth's most productive lands, demonstrates
that the main constraints on these populations were not environmental.13 The Malthusian model holds that
populations are ultimately limited by their environmental resources -- primarily the ability of a given area of land to
provide adequate food.14 But this model makes little sense when engineered ecosystems have long been the
basis for sustaining human populations.¶ Throughout the world, food production has risen in tandem with the
density of agricultural populations. Populations work harder and employ more productive technologies to
increase the productivity of land only after it becomes a limiting resource. This results in a complex
interplay of population growth, labor inputs, technology adoption, and increased productivity -- a process of
agricultural intensification that still continues in many developing agricultural regions today.15 ¶ Until the widespread commodification of
agricultural production over the last century or so, agriculturalists -- and likely their Paleolithic hunting and foraging predecessors -- used the
minimal amount of labor, technologies, and other resources necessary to support their livelihoods on the lands available to them.16 In most
regions, yield-boosting technologies, like the plow and manuring, had already been developed or introduced long before they became necessary
to overcome constraints on local food availability for subsistence populations. 17
Improving agricultural productivity facilitated
rising population growth and density and placed greater pressure on food production, which, in turn,
induced the adoption of more productive agricultural technologies.¶ While this steady increase in the
productivity of land use in tandem with population seems to conflict with the environmental degradation
classically ascribed to human use of land,18 the theoretical explanations for this are simple and robust. The
low-density populations of early farmers tended to adopt long-fallow shifting cultivation systems (rotations
of 20 years and longer), progressing through short-fallow shifting cultivation, annual cropping, multiple
cropping, and the increasing use of irrigation and fertilizers as populations grew and land became
scarce.19¶ Cultivation of agricultural land has resulted in all manner of environmental degradation at local scales. Although agricultural
productivity inevitably declines after land is first cleared for agriculture and in agricultural systems without intensive management, there is
little evidence of declining long-term productivity in agricultural lands that have been managed
intensively for millennia.20 Indeed, the overwhelming trend is quite the opposite.21 Increasing demands upon
the productivity of agricultural lands have resulted in an increasing demand for technological inputs (and
labor, in the preindustrial era) in order to maintain and increase productivity, which continues to rise in most
agricultural regions.¶ 2.¶ The long trends toward both the intensification of agricultural cultivation and the
engineering of ecosystems at increasing scope and scale have accelerated as more and more of the world transitions
from rural and agricultural societies to urban and industrial ones. The exponential growth in population, resource use,
technologies, and social systems over the past half-century marks the most rapid and powerful
transformation of both Earth and human systems ever.22¶ In the past two centuries, fossil energy has mostly replaced biomass
for fuel and substituted for most human and animal labor,23 revolutionizing the human capacity for ecosystem engineering, transport, and other
activities. Large-scale industrial synthesis has introduced artificial compounds almost too numerous to count,24 including a wide variety used to
control undesired species.25 Synthetic nitrogen fertilizers have helped to both double the amount of biologically reactive nitrogen in the Earth
system and have largely replaced the use of native soil fertility in sustaining human populations.26 Genetic engineering has accelerated gene
transfer across species.27 The
waste products of human systems are felt almost everywhere on land, water, and
air, including emissions of carbon dioxide rapid enough to acidify the oceans and change the climate
system at rates likely unprecedented in Earth's history.28 Wild fish and forests have almost disappeared,29 receding into the depths of our
ancestral memory.¶ At the same time, advances in hygiene and medicine have dramatically increased human
health and life expectancy.30 Industrial human systems are far more connected globally and evolve more rapidly than prior social
systems, accelerating the pace of social change and interaction, technological innovation, material exchange, as well as the entire tempo of human
interactions with the Earth system.31 Over the last two centuries (and especially the past fifty years) most humans have enjoyed longer, healthier,
and freer lives than we ever did during the Holocene.¶ There
is no sign that these processes or their dynamics are
slowing down in any way -- an indication of their resilience in the face of change.32 As far as food and other
basic resources are concerned, we remain far from any physically determined limits to the growth and
sustenance of our populations.33 For better or for worse, humans appear fully capable of continuing to support a
burgeoning population by engineering and transforming the planet.
Growth is sustainable – tech innovation, biology, knowledge.
Kurzweil 08
(Ray, Scientist, Inventor and Entrepreneur inducted in the National Inventors Hall of Fame and winner of
the 1999 National Medal of Technology, Washington Post, “Making the World A Billion Times Better”,
4-13, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/11/AR2008041103326.html)
MIT was so advanced in 1965 (the year I entered as a freshman) that it actually had a computer. Housed in its own building, it cost $11 million
(in today's dollars) and was shared by all students and faculty. Four decades later, the computer in your cellphone is a million times smaller, a
million times less expensive and a thousand times more powerful. That's a billion-fold increase in the amount of computation you can buy per
dollar. Yet as powerful as information technology is today, we
will make another billion-fold increase in capability (for the
same cost) over the next 25 years. That's because information technology builds on itself -- we are continually using the latest tools to
create the next so they grow in capability at an exponential rate. This doesn't just mean snazzier cellphones. It means that change will rock every
aspect of our world. The
exponential growth in computing speed will unlock a solution to global warming,
unmask the secret to longer life and solve myriad other worldly conundrums. This exponential progress in the power
of information technology goes back more than a century to the data-processing equipment used in the 1890 census, the first U.S. census to be
automated. It has been a smooth -- and highly predictable -- phenomenon despite all the vagaries of history through that period, including two
world wars, the Cold War and the Great Depression. I say highly predictable because, thanks to its exponential power, only technology possesses
the scale to address the major challenges -- such as energy and the environment, disease and poverty -- confronting society. That, at least, is the
major conclusion of a panel, organized by the National Science Foundation and the National Academy of \\Engineering, on which I recently
participated. Take energy. Today, 70 percent of it comes from fossil fuels, a 19th-century technology. But if we
could capture just one ten-thousandth of the sunlight that falls on Earth, we could meet 100 percent of the world's energy needs using this
renewable and environmentally friendly source. We can't do that now because solar panels rely on old technology, making them expensive,
inefficient, heavy and hard to install. But a new generation of panels based on nanotechnology (which manipulates matter at the level of
molecules) is
starting to overcome these obstacles. The tipping point at which energy from solar panels will
actually be less expensive than fossil fuels is only a few years away. The power we are generating from solar is
doubling every two years; at that rate, it will be able to meet all our energy needs within 20 years.
Nanotechnology itself is an information technology and therefore subject to what I call the "law of
accelerating returns," a continual doubling of capability about every year. Venture capital groups and high-tech
companies are investing billions of dollars in these new renewable energy technologies. I'm confident that the day is close at hand
when we will be able to obtain energy from sunlight using nano-engineered solar panels and store it for
use on cloudy days in nano-engineered fuel cells for less than it costs to use environmentally damaging
fossil fuels. It's important to understand that exponentials seem slow at first. In the mid-1990s, halfway through the Human Genome Project
to identify all the genes in human DNA, researchers had succeeded in collecting only 1 percent of the human genome. But the amount of genetic
data was doubling every year, and that is actually right on schedule for an exponential progression. The project was slated to take 15 years, and if
you double 1 percent seven more times you surpass 100 percent. In fact, the project was finished two years early. This helps explain why people
underestimate what is technologically feasible over long periods of time -- they think linearly while the actual course of progress is exponential.
We see the same progression with other biological technologies as well. Until just recently, medicine -- like energy -- was not an information
technology. This is now changing as scientists begin to understand how biology works as a set of information processes. The approximately
23,000 genes in our cells are basically software programs, and we are making exponential gains in modeling and simulating the information
processes that cracking the genome code has unlocked. We
also have new tools, likewise just a few years old, that allow us to
actually reprogram our biology in the same way that we reprogram our computers. For example, when the fat
insulin receptor gene was turned off in mice, they were able to eat ravenously yet remain slim and obtain the health benefits of being slim. They
didn't get heart disease or diabetes and lived 20 percent longer. There are now more than a thousand drugs in the pipeline to turn off the genes that
promote obesity, heart disease, cancer and other diseases. We can also turn enzymes off and on, and add genes to the body. I'm an adviser to a
company that removes lung cells, adds a new gene, reproduces the gene-enhanced cell a million-fold and then injects it back into the body where
it returns to the lungs. This has cured a fatal disease, pulmonary hypertension, in animals and is now undergoing human trials. The important
point is this: Now
that we can model, simulate and reprogram biology just like we can a computer, it will be
subject to the law of accelerating returns, a doubling of capability in less than a year. These technologies will be more than a
thousand times more capable in a decade, more than a million times more capable in two decades. We are now adding three months every year to
human life expectancy, but given the exponential growth of our ability to reprogram biology, this will soon go into high gear. According to my
models, 15 years from now we'll be adding more than a year each year to our remaining life expectancy. This is not a guarantee of living forever,
but it does mean that the sands of time will start pouring in rather than only pouring out. What's more, this exponential
progression of
information technology will affect our prosperity as well. The World Bank has reported, for example, that poverty in
Asia has been cut in half over the past decade due to information technologies and that at current rates it
will be cut by another 90 percent over the next decade. That phenomenon will spread around the globe. Clearly, the
transformation of our 21st-century world is under way, and information technology, in all its forms, is helping the future look
brighter exponentially.
The environment is indestructible and resilient.
Gregg Easterbrook, Brookings Economic and Governance Studies Fellow, ‘95
[A Moment on the Earth, 25-26]
In the aftermath of events such as Love Canal or the Exxon Valdez oil spill, every reference to the environment is prefaced with the
adjective "fragile." "Fragile environment" has become a welded phrase of the modern lexicon, like "aging hippie" or "fugitive financier." But
the notion of a fragile environment is profoundly wrong. Individual animals, plants, and people are distressingly
fragile. The environment that contains them is close to indestructible. The living environment of Earth has
survived ice ages; bombardments of cosmic radiation more deadly than atomic fallout; solar radiation more powerful
than the worst-case projection for ozone depletion; thousand-year periods of intense volcanism releasing global air pollution far worse
than that made by any factory; reversals of the planet's magnetic poles; the rearrangement of continents; transformation of plains into
mountain ranges and of seas into plains; fluctuations of ocean currents and the jet stream; 300-foot vacillations
shortening and lengthening of the seasons caused by shifts in the planetary axis; collisions of
in sea levels;
asteroids and comets bearing far
more force than man's nuclear arsenals; and the years without summer that followed these impacts. Yet hearts beat on,
and petals unfold still. Were the environment fragile it would have expired many eons before the advent of
the industrial affronts of the dreaming ape. Human assaults on the environment, though mischievous, are
pinprinks compared to forces of the magnitude nature is accustomed to resisting. The environmental
torments cataloged above were not confined to the primordial eons. All are “recent” in geologic terms; most were endured by the primate
ancestors of genus Homo. The bountiful natural world encountered by our forebears as they acquired self-awareness sprang not from
gentle prelapsarian caresses but ceaseless defiance of calamitous duress. Two more words conjoined n contemporary thought are
“environmental abuse” Unlike the fragile environment, abuse of the environment is a genuine concept. But the scale by which humankinds
has abused the natural world is poorly understood, again handicapping society’s ability to determine the truth of falsity of ecological
alarms. All impertinent actions by genus Homo combined have yet to produce anything approaching the environmental damage nature
inflicts on itself on a recurrent basis.
2nc – Links – Environment
Alt fails to create widespread change – the state is key.
Bryant, Collin College philosophy professor, 3-19-12
[Levi, “Black Ecology: A Pessimistic Moment” http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/03/19/blackecology-a-pessimistic-moment/]
As for the thesis that ecology is not a discourse about nature but interdependent relations, here the issue is
that I believe that eco-theory has missed a tremendous opportunity by defining itself too narrowly. When
Eileen and I were approaching people to contribute to the first issue of O-Zone (devoted to the theme of
ecology), people repeatedly expressed hesitation suggesting that they had nothing to say about ecology.
No doubt this is because they immediately associate ecology with a discourse about nature, rather than the
investigation of systems or networks of interdependent relations. Consequently, for example, a queer
theorist might think “I have nothing to say about nature because the focus of my work is the queer”,
despite the fact that in investigating queer subjectivity one perpetually is investigating relations in
language, culture, power, institutions, the body, interpersonal relations, etc. When ecology is understood
properly (or in the way I propose, anyway), we see it everywhere: the classroom, homes, media,
economy, technology, the natural world, the formation of the body, etc. And here, this is not because all
of these domains open on to the natural world (though they do), but because the analysis of all of these
domains requires an analysis of interdependent relations. And here I’m aware that there are legions of
media theorists and other cultural theorists that describe their work as ecological. The problem is that this
hasn’t really caught on and become a commonplace.¶ So where is my pessimistic moment in all of this?
For me the three key political issues are the environment, gender, and economy (in no particular order).
And as I look at environmental issues today I find myself increasingly pessimistic and feeling as if
environmental politics and thought has not been ecological enough in its analysis of these issues. When I
say that it has not been ecological enough, I am not suggesting that it has failed to properly analyze
climate change, but that it implicitly seems to repeat the nature/culture divide, treating the environment as
if it’s something over there and out there, while ignoring the social, political, and cultural world. Yet
under a properly ecological conception of being, we can’t neatly divide these worlds, but rather the
human world is one formation of nature among others. Cultural worlds are not outside of the natural
world, but are thoroughly situated within that world. And if this is the case, then this is because there is
only one being and that being is nature (one of the theses of my flat ontology).¶ So why is this an issue?
It’s an issue because while environmentalists prescribe all sorts of action we need to take to avert the
climate catastrophe, it seems to me that in failing to engage in an ecology of social and political
institutions they are whistling past the graveyard by failing to address the question of the conditions under
which action is possible. Here’s the part where everyone gets angry with me. Given the way in which
government and corporations are today intertwined, I don’t think there’s much we can do to avert the
coming catastrophe. As Morton says, referring to logical time, “the catastrophe has already happened”. So
what would it mean, I wonder, to take Morton’s thesis seriously? Here I know Tim will disagree with me.
When I look at environmental discussions in popular media and from many around me, I see the
discussion revolving almost entirely around consumers.¶ We’re told that we have to consume differently
to solve this problem. I agree that we need to consume differently, but I don’t see any feasible way in
which driving fuel efficient cars, using less heat and AC, eating less meat, etc will solve these problems.
This is because the lion’s share of our climate change problems arise from the production and distribution
end of the equation, rather than the consumption end. They are problems arising from agricultural
practices, factories, and how we ship goods throughout countries and the world. The problem is that given
the way in which governments and corporations are intertwined with one another, and given the way in
which third world countries are dependent on fossil fuels for their development, and given the fact that
only governmental solutions can address problems of production and distribution, we’re left with no
recourse for action. We can only watch helplessly while our bought and sold politicians continue to fiddle
as the world burns.
Individual action is insufficient.
Nordhaus and Shellenberger, Breakthrough Institute, 2011
[Ted and Michael, 2-25-11, “The Long Death of Environmentalism”
http://thebreakthrough.org/archive/the_long_death_of_environmenta]
Fourth, we need to stop imagining that we will solve global warming through behavior changes. There are
no doubt many good reasons for those of us with enough affluence and control over the material
circumstances of our lives to turn away from accumulative consumption. But we should not imagine this
to be a climate strategy.¶ What most greens mean when they suggest that we need to fundamentally
change our way of life isn't so fundamental at all. They mostly mean that we need to stop crass
consumerism, live in denser cities, and use public transit. And while there are many reasons to
recommend each of these particular remedies, none will have much impact upon the trajectory of
global emissions. That's because much of the world already lives in dense cities- more and more of us
every day. Relatively few of us globally today have the means to consume crassly, or even own an
automobile.¶ Global development and urbanization are salutary trends - for they bring with them the
opportunity for billions of us to live longer, healthier, and freer lives. But these trends also suggest that
the green obsession with moralizing against profligate American lifestyles is entirely irrelevant to the
future disposition of the global climate, or much anything else that really matters to the big ecological
challenges that we will face in the coming century. More and more of the world will adopt the very living
patterns that greens have so long valorized. And as they do they will use vastly more energy and
resources, not less.¶ Fifth, we have to stop treating climate change as if it were a traditional pollution
problem. As we noted in our book, climate change is as different from past pollution problems as nuclear
warfare is from gang violence. Climate change will not be solved with end-of-pipe solutions, like
smokestack scrubbers and sewage treatment plants that worked for past pollution problems. Rather it will
require us to rebuild the entire global energy system with technologies that we mostly don't have today in
any form that could conceivably scale to meet that challenge.
State good.
Nordhaus and Shellenberger, Breakthrough Institute, 2011
[Ted and Michael, 2-25-11, “The Long Death of Environmentalism”
http://thebreakthrough.org/archive/the_long_death_of_environmenta]
Eleventh, we will need to embrace again the role of the state as a direct provider of public goods. The
modern environmental movement, borne of the new left rejection of social authority of all sorts, has
embraced the notion of state regulation and even creation of private markets while largely rejecting the
generative role of the state. In the modern environmental imagination, government promotion of
technology - whether nuclear power, the green revolution, synfuels, or ethanol - almost always ends
badly.¶ Never mind that virtually the entire history of American industrialization and technological
innovation is the story of government investments in the development and commercialization of new
technologies. Think of a transformative technology over the last century - computers, the Internet,
pharmaceutical drugs, jet turbines, cellular telephones, nuclear power - and what you will find is
government investing in those technologies at a scale that private firms simply cannot replicate.
Critique is not enough.
Brooks, Chair of Climate Change Studies at the University of Adelaide, ‘11
(Barry, “Australia’s nuclear options CEDA policy perspective,” November 2011,
http://ceda.com.au/media/153125/nuclearfinal8nov.pdf)
Improved efficiency in the way we use energy offers a partial fix, at least in the short term. In the broader
context, to imagine that the global human enterprise will somehow manage to get by with less just doesn’t
stack up when faced with the reality of a fast developing, energy-starved world. Citizens in Western
democracies are simply not going to vote for governments dedicated to lower growth and some
concomitant critique of consumerism, and nor is an authoritarian regime such as in China going to risk
social unrest, probably of a profound order, by any embrace of a low growth economic strategy. As such,
reality is demanding, and we must carefully scrutinise the case put by those who believe that a wholesale
reduction in energy use is the answer. Critics do not seem to understand – or refuse to acknowledge – the
basis of modern economics and the investment culture. Some dream of shifts in the West and the East
away from consumerism. There is a quasi-spiritualism which underpins such views. Yet at a time of
crisis, societies must be ruthlessly practical in solving their core problems or risk collapse. First, there is
an economic opportunity cost involved in reducing our energy use (beyond wastage, which clearly makes
sense to avoid), given that economic growth, affluence and health are all underpinned by technological
choices and the availability of reliable, cost-effective services.9 Second, most people will object
vociferously to measures that propose to, or are even perceived to lead to, a decline in their standard of
living. We need to work with this reality, and seek, as an environmentally aware society, to deliver these
aspirations in a sustainable way.
Can’t overcome human nature.
Matthey, Research Associate, Max Planck Institute of Economics, Strategic
Interaction Group, 10
(Astrid, Max Planck Institute of Economics, Strategic Interaction Group, Jena, Germany, “Less is more:
the influence of aspirations and priming on well-being,” Journal of Cleaner Production, Volume 18, Issue
6, April 2010, Pages 525-530, Science Direct)
Matthey [10] conducts a simple experiment to test the influence of priming on people's reference states.
Priming is a method that is frequently used in psychology, and is meant to activate certain concepts in the
subjects' minds without drawing their attention to this activation (see, e.g., [14]). Participants in this
experiment had to form 20 meaningful phrases from a group of five words per phrase. Ten of these
phrases were neutral and the same across groups. The other ten referred to either material achievements
(e.g., “Smart investors become rich.”), social contents (e.g., “Children help their parents.”) or neutral
contents. This task took about 5 min. It was intended to activate social vs. material concepts in the
subjects' minds. Then participants were given an endowment of 5 Euro and had to decide how much of it
to invest in a lottery. In this lottery they would either triple or lose the invested amount with equal
probability. The non-invested amounts could be kept for sure.
As the next step, subjects' risk attitudes were inferred from their observed investment decisions. Using the
same method as described above (see [10], for details), these risk attitudes were then used to infer
differences in subjects' reference states regarding monetary outcomes.
The results show that activating the material rather than the social concept led to higher investments of on
average 60 Cents, or approximately half a standard deviation (difference significant at 1%, average
investments 3.84 vs. 3.23 Euro). The subjects in the material treatment had lower risk aversion and hence
higher reference states regarding material outcomes than those in the social treatment. This suggests that
even such a brief priming exercise in a classroom environment is sufficient to significantly influence
people's reference states. It gives an indication on how strongly people's reference states may depend on
the “priming” they are exposed to in their every day life. The stronger the focus and emphasis on
consumption and material achievements, the higher reference states must be expected in this
dimension. In turn, the higher the reference states, the higher a loss in utility will people experience
when their consumption levels decrease, and the more negative they will perceive policies that may
have this effect.¶
This result has implications for the long-term effects of the current crisis. As mentioned above, since the
emergence of the crisis economic issues play a dominant role in the public discussion. This excessive
coverage must be expected to work as a strong priming device of the material dimension. The
experimental results would then predict a further rise in reference states regarding material standards,
leading to strong feelings of loss when actual consumption levels decrease.
In addition, policy makers have made it clear that the best way for the population to help ease the
crisis is to go shopping. Several countries, like Germany and France, even discussed the issue of
consumption vouchers to boost domestic demand. Whatever the direct effect of this strategy on the
economy, it cannot be expected to ease the emphasis on consumption or help in the reduction of
reference states and the associated feelings of loss. Again, the stronger the losses people experience or
expect to experience, the lower the support of measures that do not aim at restoring economic
growth and increasing consumption.
Intellectual change has little effect on consumption patterns – concrete actions are
key.
Lewis, George Washington University geography and regional science professor,
1992
[Martin, “Green Delusions: An Environmentalist Critique of Radical Environmentalism”
http://books.google.com/books?id=cMThEEHW2JYC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false,
p.11-2]
Many eco-radicals hope that a massive ideological campaign can transform popular perceptions, leading
both to a fundamental change in lifestyles and to large-scale social reconstruction. Such a view is highly
credulous. The notion that continued intellectual hectoring will eventually result in a mass conversion to
environmental monasticism (Roszak 1979:289)--marked by vows of poverty and nonprocreation--is
difficult to accept. While radical views have come to dominate many environmental circles, their effect
on the populace at large has been minimal. Despite the greening of European politics that recently gave
stalwarts considerable hope, the more recent green plunge suggests that even the European electorate
lacks commitment to environmental radicalism. In the United States several decades of preaching the
same eco-radical gospel have had little appreciable effect; the public remains, as before, wedded to
consumer culture and creature comforts. The stubborn hope that nonetheless continues to inform green
extremism stems from a pervasive philosophical error in radical environmentalism. As David Pepper
(1989) shows, most eco-radical thought is mired in idealism: in this case the belief that the roots of the
ecological crisis lie ultimately in ideas about nature and humanity. As Dobson (1990:37) puts it: "Central
to the theoretical canon of Green politics is the belief that our social, political, and economic problems are
substantially caused by our intellectual relationship with the world" (see also Milbrath 1989:338). If only
such ideas would change, many aver, all would be well. Such a belief has inspired the writing of eloquent
jeremiads; it is less conducive to designing concrete strategies for effective social and economic change.
It is certainly not my belief that ideas are insignificant or that attempting to change others’ opinions is a
futile endeavor. If that were true I would hardly feel compelled to write a polemic work of this kind. But I
am also convinced that changing ideas alone is insufficient. Widespread ideological conversion, even if it
were to occur, would hardly be adequate for genuine social transformation. Specific policies must still be
formulated, and specific political plans must be devised if those policies are ever to be realized.
Incremental improvements are key to support.
Levi, CFR Senior Fellow for Energy and the Environment, 10-5-12
(Michael, “How Can We Cope With Deep Climate Uncertainty?,”
http://blogs.cfr.org/levi/2012/10/05/how-can-we-cope-with-deep-climate-uncertainty/)
When you’re faced with a lot of uncertainty that’s difficult or impossible to quantify, your best bet is
usually to develop a strategy that’s robust to unknowns, rather than one that tries to optimize outcomes.
David Roberts had a great post last week explaining this. (It’s usually the most important frame that I use
to think about public policy.) A focus on robustness, though, often runs into its own special challenges. In
this post, I want to walk through one of those that’s particularly important in the context of climate
change.¶ The basic problem is that climate policy faces at least two sets of big unknowns. The first
concerns the climate itself: How much damage will a given accumulation of greenhouse gases cause?
Will damages rise steadily with increasing concentrations – or are there thresholds beyond which impacts
will rapidly multiply? In the presence of such unknowns, a push for robustness tends to mean a push for
deeper emissions cuts, even if those might turn out to cost more than actual climate sensitivity ultimately
justifies.¶ The second set of unknowns surrounds the relationship between public policy and the energy
system. We have little idea of which policies would actually succeed in delivering particular emissions
reductions – and no, “capping” emissions doesn’t guarantee any particular outcome.¶ Combining this
source of uncertainty with the first one can quickly run you into trouble. Unknowns at the extremely ugly
end of possible climate outcomes tend to drive policy toward big bets on large emissions reductions. But
these sorts of bets, which take us the furthest away from past experience, are vulnerable to the biggest
unknowns on the policy side. It’s difficult to completely escape this bind.¶ Let me flesh this out a bit with
one example. Worries that climate change could be particularly ugly tend to motivate hostility to anything
other than zero-carbon energy. That steers people toward embracing ambitious and expensive policies.
But the policies that maximize the odds of massive emissions cuts don’t necessarily maximize the odds of
more modest but still substantial ones.¶ Why? Pushing squarely on an immediate switch to zero-carbon
fuels, and incidentally treating all fossil fuels as similar, increases the odds that if a move to zero-carbon
energy doesn’t materialize quickly, you’ll be left with coal. Focusing on particularly disruptive policies
because they’re the only ones that have a chance to be “strong enough” to deal with an unexpectedly
sensitive climate also raises the odds of political failure, and hence also increases the chances of
ultimately being stuck with the status quo. Both of these tendencies tend to shift the distribution of likely
climate outcomes toward the extremes: either things end up a lot better than they’re currently on course to
turn out, or our prospects don’ improve much at.
AT: Jevon’s Paradox
Rebound effect exaggerated
Niemeyer, science writer for Ars Technica, 1-23-13
(Kyle, He has B.S. and M.S. degrees in Aerospace Engineering from Case Western Reserve University,
and is currently a Ph.D. candidate focusing on combustion modeling, “How badly does the rebound effect
undercut energy efficiency?,” http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/01/how-badly-does-the-reboundeffect-undercut-energy-efficiency/)
Give everyone fuel-efficient cars and we’ll use less fuel, right? According to some economists—and
opponents of mandated improvements in energy efficiency—we'll squander some of the savings by
driving more. That argument goes for other forms of energy efficiency, suggesting they all can actually
lead to greater energy use through a rebound effect. However, a group of economists and others, led by
Kenneth Gillingham of Yale University, argue in a new Nature commentary that the rebound effect is
exaggerated.¶ According to their article, the effect is real but small: 5 to 30 percent of energy savings
may be lost due to greater use. At most, this could reach a little over half of intended savings lost on large
scales—but energy is still saved overall. These numbers are supported by many (“vast” is the word used
by the authors) academic studies and simulations.¶ To be fair, the rebound effect is not simple. It
actually comes about via four factors that interact and combine in a complex manner. The first is the
“direct” effect, where a drop in the cost of using some energy-consuming device (like a car or washing
machine) results in slightly increased use. For cars, various studies show that this reduces savings in
energy from the improved efficiency by 5 to 23 percent initially. After everyone becomes accustomed to
the lower fuel costs, this could eventually rise to 30 percent.¶ This number is smaller for other devices like
home appliances—around 10 percent. How much more often would you use your washing machine if it
was more efficient? Would you even notice? The authors argue that these numbers are probably
overestimates. People don’t use efficiency directly to gauge how much energy to use, but rather price.
That brings the numbers down to somewhere between 5 and 10 percent.
The rebound effect small
Giberson, instructor with the Center for Energy Commerce in the Rawls College of
Business at Texas Tech University, 8-9-12
(Michael, “The rebound effect: the ACEEE strikes back,”
theenergycollective.com/michaelgiberson/101156/rebound-effect-aceee-strikesback?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=The+Energy+Collective+(all+posts
))
This would be a matter of mere technical interest among energy policy economists but for conservation
advocates who have seized onto engineering efficiency regulation as a key public policy tool to promote
resource conservation. One such group of conservation advocates, the American Council for an Energy
Efficient Economy, has produced its own survey of the efficiency and rebound literature. In announcing
the study, ACEEE said:
… we found that there are both direct and indirect rebound effects, but these tend to be modest. Direct
rebound effects are generally 10% or less. Indirect rebound effects are less well understood but the best
available estimate is somewhere around 11%. These two types of rebound can be combined to estimate
total rebound of about 20%. We examined claims of “backfire” (100% rebound), but they do not stand up
to scrutiny. Furthermore, direct rebound effects can potentially be reduced through improved approaches
to inform consumers about their energy use in ways that might influence their behavior. And indirect
rebound effects, which appear to be linked to the share of our economy that goes to energy, may decline
as the energy intensity of our economy decreases.
Efficiency policy often gets treated as a “win win win” type of policy, which accounts for some of its
popularity as a conservation tool. The public gets a reduction in any externalities associated with the
production and consumption of the resource, more resources are left in the ground for future generations,
and the consumers get more bang for their resource buck. Rebound effects cut into the first two effects,
and whether consumers actually get more bang for their buck depends on the cost of the efficiency
improvements and the degree to which consumers prefer to save some money now over more money
later. The reason efficiency policy advocates want to push back against rebound is that recognizing even
modest rebound effects can substantially tilt cost-benefit analysis against energy efficiency policies.
Generic Reformism Blocks
***Uniqueness***
Uniqueness – State Inevitable
The state is inevitable – utilizing it productively is the only effective means to stop
oppression.
Soft Targets, Los Angeles interviewer, 2007
[Interview with Zizek, Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social Studies, “Divine Violence and
Liberated Territories: SOFT TARGETS talks with Slavoj Žižek”
http://www.softtargetsjournal.com/web/zizek.php]
I’m becoming skeptical of the Leftist anti-State logic. It will not go unnoticed that this discourse
finds an echo on the Right as well. Moreover, I don’t see any signs of the so-called
"disappearance of the State." To the contrary. And to take the United States as an example, I have to
confess that 80 percent of the time, when there is a conflict between civil society and the State, I am
on the side of the State. Most of the time, the State must intervene when some local right-wing
groups want to ban the teaching of evolution in schools, and so on. I think it’s very important,
then, for the Left to influence and use, and perhaps even seize, when possible, State apparatuses.
This is not sufficient unto itself, of course. In fact, I think we need to oppose the language of "ligne
de fuite" and self-organization and so on with something that is completely taboo on the Left
today—like garlic for the vampire—namely, the idea of large State or even larger collective
decisions. It’s the same with the notion of "deterritorialization": I’ve even begun to think that we
should rehabilitate the notion of "territory." Peter Hallward gave me this idea. Almost all the conflicts
of our time, especially in the Middle East, are structured by the question of territory. I think the Left
should begin to think in terms of what could be called "liberated territories."
[Tom Note- This is an interview with Zizek]
Uniqueness – AT: Political Already Ceded
Their cede the political arguments are backward – their cultural conceptualization
of politics is the reason the state has been ceded – only reinvesting in politics AND
NOT culture can stop the right.
Gitlin, Columbia University journalism and sociology professor, 1997
[Todd, former UC Berkley and NYU sociology professor, Dissent Magazine, “The Anti-Political
Populism of Cultural Studies” Proquest]
Consolation: here is an explanation for the rise of academic cultural studies during precisely the years
when the right has held political and economic power longer and more consistently than at any other time
in more than a half century. Now, in effect, "the cultural is political," and more, it is regarded as central to
the control of political and economic resources. The control of popular culture is held to have become
decisive in the fate of contemporary societies-or at least it is the sphere in which opposition can find
footing, find breathing space, rally the powerless, defy the grip of the dominant ideas, isolate the powers
that be, and prepare for a "war of position" against their dwindling ramparts. On this view, to dwell on the
centrality of popular culture is more than an academic's way of filling her hours; it is a useful certification
of the people and their projects. To put it more neutrally, the political aura of cultural studies is supported
by something like a "false consciousness" premise: the analytical assumption that what holds the ruling
groups in power is their capacity to muffle, deform, paralyze, or destroy contrary tendencies of an
emotional or ideological nature. By the same token, if there is to be a significant "opposition," it must first
find a base in popular culture-and first also turns out to be second, third, and fourth, since popular culture
is so much more accessible, so much more porous, so much more changeable than the economic
and political order. With time, what began as compensation hardened-became institutionalized-into a
tradition. Younger scholars gravitated to cultural studies because it was to them incontestable that culture
was politics. To do cultural studies, especially in connection with identity politics, was the politics they
knew. The contrast with the rest of the West is illuminating. In varying degrees, left-wing intellectuals in
France, Italy, Scandinavia, Germany, Spain and elsewhere retain energizing attachments to Social
Democratic, Green, and other left-wing parties. There, the association of culture with excellence and
traditional elites remains strong. But in the Anglo-American world, including Australia, these conditions
scarcely obtain. Here, in a discouraging time, popular culture emerges as a consolation prize. (The same
happened in Latin America, with the decline of left-wing hopes.) The sting fades from the
fragmentation of the organized left, the metastasis of murderous nationalism, the twilight of socialist
dreams virtually everywhere. Class inequality may have soared, ruthless individualism may have
intensified, the conditions of life for the poor may have worsened, racial tensions may have mounted,
unions and social democratic parties may have weakened or reached an impasse, but never mind. Attend
to popular culture, study it with sympathy, and one need not dwell on unpleasant realities. One need not
be unduly vexed by electoral defeats. One need not be preoccupied by the ways in which the political
culture's center of gravity has moved rightward-or rather, one can put this down to the iron grip of the
established media institutions. One need not even be rigorous about what one opposes and what one
proposes in its place. Is capitalism the trouble? Is it the particular form of capitalism practiced by
multinational corporations in a deregulatory era? Is it patriarchy (and is that the proper term for a society
that has seen an upheaval in relations between women and men in the course of a half-century)? Racism?
Antidemocracy? Practitioners of cultural studies, like the rest of the academic left, are frequently
elusive. Speaking cavalierly of "opposition" and "resistance" permits-rather, cultivates-a
certain sloppiness of thinking, making it possible to remain "left" without having to face the most difficult
questions of political selfdefinition. The situation of cultural studies conforms to the contours of our
political moment. It confirms-and reinforces-the current paralysis: the incapacity of social movements and
dissonant sensibilities to imagine effective forms of public engagement. It substitutes an
obsession with popular culture for coherent economic-political thought or a connection with mobilizable
populations outside the academy and across identity lines. One must underscore that this is not simply
because of cultural studies' default. The default is an effect more than a cause. It has its reasons. The odds
are indeed stacked against serious forward motion in conventional politics. Political power is not only
beyond reach, but functional majorities disdain it, finding the government and all its works
contemptible. Few of the central problems of contemporary civilization are seriously contested within the
narrow band of conventional discourse. Unconventional politics, such as it is, is mostly fragmented and
self-contained along lines of racial, gender, and sexual identities. One cannot say that cultural studies
diverts energy from a vigorous politics that is already in force. Still, insofar as cultural studies makes
claims for itself as an insurgent politics, the field is presumptuous and misleading. Its attempt to
legitimize the ecstasies of the moment confirms the collective withdrawal from democratic hope. Seeking
to find political energies in audiences who function as audiences, rather than in citizens functioning as
citizens, the dominant current in cultural studies is pressed willy-nilly toward an uncritical celebration of
technological progress. It offers no resistance to the primacy of visual and nonlinear culture over the
literary and linear. To the contrary: it embraces technological innovation as soon as the latest
developments prove popular. It embraces the sufficiency of markets; its main idea of the intellect's
democratic commitment is to flatter the audience. Is there a chance of a modest redemption? Perhaps, if
we imagine a harder headed, less wishful cultural studies, free of the burden of imagining itself to be a
political practice. A chastened, realistic cultural studies would divest itself of political pretensions. It
would not claim to be politics. It would not mistake the academy for the larger society. It would be less
romantic about the world-and about itself. Rigorous practitioners of cultural studies should be more
curious about the world that remains to be researched and changed. We would learn more about politics,
economy, and society, and in the process, appreciate better what culture, and cultural study, do not
accomplish. If we wish to do politics, let us organize groups, coalitions, demonstrations, lobbies,
whatever; let us do politics. Let us not think that our academic work is already that.
Their politics is fundamentally conservative – they inherently focus on me-search
instead of collective action.
Chandler, University of Westminster international relations professor, 2007
[David, “The Attraction of Post-Territorial Politics: Ethics and Activism in the International Sphere”
http://www.davidchandler.org/pdf/short_articles/Inaugural%20lecture.pdf, p.2-7]
However, politics is no less important to many of us today. Politics still gives us a sense of social
connection and social rootedness and gives meaning to many of our lives. It is just that the nature and
practices of this politics are different. We are less likely to engage in the formal politics of representation
- of elections and governments - but in post-territorial politics, a politics where there is much less division
between the private sphere and the public one and much less division between national, territorial,
concerns and global ones. This type of politics is on the one hand ‘global’ but, on the other, highly
individualised: it is very much the politics of our everyday lives – the sense of meaning we get from
thinking about global warming when we turn off the taps when we brush our teeth, take our rubbish out
for recycling or cut back on our car use - we might also do global politics in deriving meaning from the
ethical or social value of our work, or in our subscription or support for good causes from Oxfam to
Greenpeace and Christian Aid.¶ I want to suggest that when we do ‘politics’ nowadays it is less the ‘old’
politics, of self-interest, political parties, and concern for governmental power, than the ‘new’ politics of
global ethical concerns. I further want to suggest that the forms and content of this new global approach
to the political are more akin to religious beliefs and practices than to the forms of our social political
engagement in the past. Global politics is similar to religious approaches in three vital respects: 1) global
post-territorial politics are no longer concerned with power, its’ concerns are free-floating and in many
ways, existential, about how we live our lives; 2) global politics revolve around practices with are private
and individualised, they are about us as individuals and our ethical choices; 3) the practice of global
politics tends to be non-instrumental, we do not subordinate ourselves to collective associations or parties
and are more¶ likely to give value to our aspirations, acts, or the fact of our awareness of an issue, as an
end in-itself. It is as if we are upholding our goodness or ethicality in the face of an increasingly
confusing, problematic and alienating world – our politics in this sense are an expression or voice, in
Marx’s words, of ‘the heart in a heartless world’ or ‘the soul of a soulless condition’.¶ The practice of
‘doing politics’ as a form of religiosity is a highly conservative one. As Marx argued, religion was the
‘opium of the people’ - this is politics as a sedative or pacifier: it feeds an illusory view of change at the
expense of genuine social engagement and transformation. I want to argue that global ethical politics
reflects and institutionalises our sense of disconnection and social atomisation and results in irrational and
unaccountable government policy making. I want to illustrate my points by briefly looking at the practices
of global ethics in three spheres, those of radical political activism, government policy making and
academia.¶ Radical activism¶ People often argue that there is nothing passive or conservative about radical
political activist protests, such as the 2003 anti-war march, anti-capitalism and anti-globalisation protests,
the huge march to Make Poverty History at the end of 2005, involvement in the World Social Forums or
the radical jihad of Al-Qaeda. I disagree; these new forms of protest are highly individualised and
personal ones - there is no attempt to build a social or collective movement. It appears that theatrical
suicide, demonstrating, badge and bracelet wearing are ethical acts in themselves: personal statements of
awareness, rather than attempts to engage politically with society.¶ This is illustrated by the ‘celebration of
differences’ at marches, protests and social forums. It is as if people are more concerned with the creation
of a sense of community through differences than with any political debate, shared agreement or
collective purpose. It seems to me that if someone was really concerned with ending war or with ending
poverty or with overthrowing capitalism, that political views and political differences would be quite
important. Is war caused by capitalism, by human nature, or by the existence of guns and other weapons?
It would seem important to debate reasons, causes and solutions, it would also seem necessary to give
those political differences an organisational expression if there was a serious project of social change.¶
Rather than a political engagement with the world, it seems that radical political activism today is a form
of social disengagement – expressed in the anti-war marchers’ slogan of ‘Not in My Name’, or the
assumption that wearing a plastic bracelet or setting up an internet blog diary is the same as engaging in
political debate. In fact, it seems that political activism is a practice which isolates individuals who think
that demonstrating a personal commitment or awareness of problems is preferable to engaging with other
people who are often dismissed as uncaring or brain-washed by consumerism. The narcissistic aspects of
the practice of this type of global politics are expressed clearly by individuals who are obsessed with
reducing their carbon footprint, deriving their idealised sense of social connection from an ever increasing
awareness of themselves and by giving ‘political’ meaning to every personal action.¶ Global ethics appear
to be in demand because they offer us a sense of social connection and meaning while at the same time
giving us the freedom to construct the meaning for ourselves, to pick our causes of concern, and enabling
us to be free of responsibilities for acting as part of a collective association, for winning an argument or
for success at the ballot-box. While the appeal of global ethical politics is an individualistic one, the
lack of success or impact of radical activism is also reflected in its rejection of any form of social
movement or organisation.¶ Governments¶ Strange as it may seem, the only people who are keener on
global ethics than radical activists are political elites. Since the end of the Cold War, global ethics have
formed the core of foreign policy and foreign policy has tended to dominate domestic politics. Global
ethics are at the centre of debates and discussion over humanitarian intervention, ‘healing the scar of
Africa’, the war on terror and the ‘war against climate insecurity’. Tony Blair argued in the Guardian last
week that ‘foreign policy is no longer foreign policy’ (Timothy Garten Ash, ‘Like it or Loath it, after 10
years Blair knows exactly what he stands for’, 26 April 2007), this is certainly true. ¶ Traditional foreign
policy, based on strategic geo-political interests with a clear framework for policy-making, no longer
seems so important. The government is down-sizing the old Foreign and Commonwealth Office where
people were regional experts, spoke the languages and were engaged for the long-term, and provides
more resources to the Department for International Development where its staff are experts in good
causes. This shift was clear in the UK’s attempt to develop an Ethical Foreign Policy in the 1990s – an
approach which openly claimed to have rejected strategic interests for values and the promotion of
Britain’s caring and sharing ‘identity’. Clearly, the projection of foreign policy on the basis of
demonstrations of values and identity, rather than an understanding of the needs and interests of people on
the ground, leads to ill thought-through and short-termist policy-making, as was seen in the ‘value-based’
interventions from Bosnia to Iraq (see Blair’s recent Foreign Affairs article, ‘A Battle for Global Values’,
86:1 (2007), pp.79–90).¶ Governments have been more than happy to put global ethics at the top of the
political agenda for - the same reasons that radical activists have been eager to shift to the global sphere –
the freedom from political responsibility that it affords them. Every government and international
institution has shifted from strategic and instrumental policy-making based on a clear political programme
to the ambitious assertion of global causes – saving the planet, ending poverty, saving Africa, not just
ending war but solving the causes of conflict etc – of course, the more ambitious the aim the less anyone
can be held to account for success and failure. In fact, the more global the problem is, the more
responsibility can be shifted to blame the US or the UN for the failure to translate ethical claims into
concrete results. Ethical global questions, where the alleged values of the UN, the UK, the ‘civilised
world’, NATO or the EU are on the line in ‘wars of choice’ from the war on terror to the war on global
warming lack traditional instrumentality because they are driven less by the traditional interests of
Realpolitik than the narcissistic search for meaning or identity.¶ Governments feel the consequences of
their lack of social connection, even more than we do as individuals; it undermines any attempt to
represent shared interests or cohere political programmes. As Baudrillard suggests, without a connection
to the ‘represented’ masses, political leaders are as open to ridicule and exposure as the ‘Emperor with no
clothes’ (In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, New York: Semiotext(e), 1983, for example). It is this
lack of shared social goals which makes instrumental policy-making increasingly problematic. As Donald
Rumsfeld stated about the war on terror, ‘there are no metrics’ to help assess whether the war is being
won or lost. These wars and campaigns, often alleged to be based on the altruistic claim of the needs and
interests of others, are demonstrations and performances, based on ethical claims rather than responsible
practices and policies. Max Weber once counterposed this type of politics – the ‘ethics of conviction’ – to
the ‘ethics of responsibility’ in his lecture on ‘Politics as a Vocation’. The desire to act on the
international scene without a clear strategy or purpose has led to highly destabilising interventions from
the Balkans to Iraq and to the moralisation of a wide range of issues from war crimes to EU membership
requirements.¶ Academia¶ Today more and more people are ‘doing politics’ in their academic work. This
is the reason for the boom in International Relations study and the attraction of other social sciences to the
global sphere. I would argue that the attraction of IR for many people has not been IR theory but the
desire to practice global ethics. The boom in the IR discipline has coincided with a rejection of Realist
theoretical frameworks of power and interests and the sovereignty/anarchy problematic. However, I
would argue that this rejection has not been a product of theoretical engagement with Realism but an
ethical act of rejection of Realism’s ontological focus.¶ It seems that our ideas and our theories say much
more about us than the world we live in. Normative theorists and Constructivists tend to support the
global ethical turn arguing that we should not be as concerned with ‘what is’ as with the potential for the
emergence of global ethical community. Constructivists, in particular, focus upon the ethical language
which political elites espouse rather than the practices of power. But the most dangerous trends in the
discipline today are those frameworks which have taken up Critical theory and argue that focusing on the
world as it exists is conservative ‘problem-solving’ while the task for critical theorists is to focus on
emancipatory alternative forms of living or of thinking about the world. Critical thought then becomes a
process of wishful thinking rather than one of engagement, with its advocates arguing that we need to
focus on clarifying our own ethical frameworks and biases and positionality before thinking about or
teaching on world affairs; in the process this becomes ‘me-search’ rather than research. We have
moved a long way from Hedley Bull’s perspective that, for academic research to be truly radical, we had
to put our values to the side to follow where the question or inquiry might lead.¶ The inward-looking and
narcissistic trends in academia, where we are more concerned with our ‘reflectivity’ – the awareness of
our own ethics and values - than with engaging with the world, was brought home to me when I asked my
IR students which theoretical frameworks they agreed with most and they replied mostly Critical theory
and Constructivism despite the fact that they thought that states operated on the basis of power and selfinterest in a world of anarchy. Their theoretical preferences were based more on what their choices said
about them as ethical individuals than about how theory might be used to understand and engage with the
world.
Globalization outpaces politics – expanding what constitutes politics doesn’t
increase political engagement – if the political has been ceded it is because political
engagement is too thin.
Chandler, University of Westminster international relations professor, 2009
[David, “The Global Ideology: Rethinking the Politics of the ‘Global Turn’ in IR”
http://www.davidchandler.org/pdf/journal_articles/Journal%20of%20Int%20Rels%20%20Global%20Ideology%20published.pdf, p.535-7]
While the Cold War discipline of international relations is understood in¶ ideological terms of power and
interests, the critical and constructivist theorists who¶ regularly assert the constitutive nature of theorising
rarely understand this as a socially¶ mediated relationship. Robert Cox’s breakdown of social theorising
into ‘problemsolving¶ approaches’, which restrict themselves to attempts to resolve problems on¶ the
basis of existing interests and relations of power, and ‘critical approaches’, which¶ take an emancipatory
approach,20 has often been reproduced in ways which tend to¶ understand the act of theorising
idealistically.21 Theorising is then seen to construct¶ society in line with the political interests or class
position of the theorist; critical¶ theorising then increasingly becomes a political act or statement in itself
regardless¶ of any link to social agency.22
In this context, critical ‘global’ understandings of community and political interaction¶ were often seen to
be progressive and a challenge to the power and interests¶ of (nation state-based) political elites. In the
1990s, critical theorists led the call for¶ the globalisation of our conceptions of the international sphere,
highlighted in the¶ shift away from understanding security in terms of state security to the security of¶ the
individual.23 It was argued that the expansion of the security referent, from the state¶ to the global level,
and the expansion of our understanding of threats, from narrow¶ military concerns to concerns of
environmental degradation, poverty and women’s¶ rights, would transform the international agenda.
States were seen as barriers to a¶ new, more progressive world order based on shared concerns and
interests. Rather¶ than being the bearers of security, protecting their citizens, states were increasingly¶
conceived of as a threat to their citizens’ security, through genocide, war and their¶ abuse of human
rights.
These critical concerns were swiftly taken up by Western governments, international¶ institutions and
NGOs and, as they did so, globalised visions of security,¶ focusing on securing the needs of individuals
rather than states, became increasingly¶ part of the political mainstream.24 For some theorists, working
within constructivist¶ frameworks, the emergence of global politics has been framed in ways less directly¶
confrontational to the interests of states. Instead, it is argued, Western state political¶ elites have begun to
conceive of their self-interests in a more enlightened way – one¶ which is less confrontational and more
cooperative.25 This shift in the perception of¶ state interests and the manner of their projection in the
international sphere has been¶ understood to be a product of global interaction and the construction of
new norms¶ of behaviour and ideas of global citizenship. These new norms were often seen to be¶ driven
by NGOs and other ‘norm entrepreneurs’ acting in the global political sphere,¶ shaping public perceptions
of the global political agenda and forcing states to respond¶ and to gradually take on board assumptions
about the importance of issues such as human rights and the rule of law.26 Global politics was therefore
often conceived not¶ in geopolitical, territorial terms of realpolitik but in the ethical terms of a
contestation¶ between global approaches and state-based ones, which pitted cosmopolitanism and¶ human
rights advocacy against narrow national interests, which were alleged to hold¶ back the consistent
implementation of emerging global norms.27
Frameworks of global politics in the 1990s tended to contrast the international¶ sphere of progress and
NGO activism with an increasingly moribund domestic¶ sphere of political party competition. In the 1990s
power was still seen to reside at¶ the level of states, even though the agenda was being set by global
interaction and¶ politics operating at the global level. In the 2000s, the globalisation of politics has¶
become increasingly expressed in the erosion of distinctions between the global¶ and the domestic.28 For
radical poststructuralist theorists, the erosion of the barrier¶ between the global and the domestic has been
commonly articulated in terms of the¶ hegemony of neoliberal capitalism, empire, or of biopower. The
undermining of the¶ politics of state-based representation and the globalisation of regulatory power has¶
become the starting assumption for the poststructuralist ‘scaling up’ of Foucault in¶ critiques of global
governmentality.29 If power was located at the global level then¶ resistance was as well, in a direct
challenge to this power.30 This ‘globalisation’ of¶ resistance meant that the focus was not necessarily on
narrow NGO activism and¶ lobbying but could include any form of protest and dissent, as long as it was
viewed¶ from the perspective of global struggle: from ethical shopping to protests against free¶ trade or
the destruction of the rain forests.31
In the dominant frameworks for understanding the globalisation of politics, the¶ problem is not that
politics is represented in global, deterritorialised terms, but that¶ our understandings of the global as the
political sphere for contestation and progress¶ lag behind the economic and social transformations that
have created our globalised¶ world and with it the globalised nature of threats – from global warming to
the global¶ war on terror. This framework closes off any need for questioning the politicisation¶ of the
global level, suggesting that the only questions concern the manner in which¶ we undertake global politics
and/or reorganise our political institutions to adapt to¶ the threats and possibilities of our ‘global world’.
This demonstrates the power of¶ what is here conceptualised as the Global Ideology: an ideological
framework which¶ naturalises and reifies its subject matter, posing the globalisation of politics as a matter ¶
of imposed necessity rather than a social construct which is open to critique.
Demystifying the ‘global’¶ Demystifying the ‘global’ involves articulating the mediating links between
our¶ subjective understanding of the globalised world and the attenuated nature of social¶ and political
struggle. It is possible to understand the globalisation of politics as a¶ social construct without theoretical
positions being directly understood as unmediated¶ reflections of clashing political interests or subject
positions. Critical theorists and¶ constructivists have often tended to conceive of their work as advocacy
on the¶ part of the progressive forces of global civil society in its political struggle against¶ powerful
elites, defending the status quo of state-based international relations. In¶ the same way, critical
poststructuralists tend to understand their work as part of the¶ struggle against the power of liberal
‘empire’ ranged against the radical challenge¶ of the ‘multitude’.32
In these frameworks of understanding global politics, the shift towards the global¶ is seen as indicative of
new lines of political struggle which have replaced those of¶ the territorialised framework of Left and
Right. For liberal and critical theorists,¶ this is the struggle for human rights and emancipation against the
sovereign power¶ of states. For poststructuralist theorists, this is seen as the struggle for autonomy¶ and
difference against the universalising war waged ‘over ways of life itself’ by¶ neoliberal biopolitical
governance. However, these struggles remain immanent ones,¶ in which global political social forces of
progress are intimated but are yet to fully¶ develop. There is a problem of the social agency, the collective
political subject,¶ which can give content to the theorising of global struggle articulated by academic¶
theorists.33
Without a social agency, which can give global politics the content which academic¶ theorists insist is
immanent, there seems to be a weak link in the chain of argument¶ which asserts that the globalising
nature of economic and social transformations has¶ run ahead of our capacities to engage with the world
politically. On the one hand,¶ there appears to be a crude technological determinism at work: somehow,
speeded¶ up communications are held to have transformed social relations to such an extent¶ that we need
new frameworks of social and political theorising and practices. On¶ the other hand, there appears to be a
crude idealism: the enlightened advocates of¶ global progress are held to represent or express the
immanent or arising progressive¶ forces – from global civil society to the ‘multitude’ – which are yet to
make their own¶ appearance. How can the theoretical and practical gap be bridged between assertions¶ of
transformed social relations, which are alleged to have created a deterritorialised¶ world, and the fact that
the social forces, alleged to reflect or be agents of these¶ changes, remain immanent or marginal? It seems
that we live in a world where politics¶ has become globalised in the absence of political struggle
rather than as a result of¶ the expanded nature of collective political engagement.
***Links***
2nc – EXTN – State Key
Instrumental use of policy is key – any other form of politics is merely symbolic.
Chandler, University of Westminster international relations professor, 2007
[David, “The Politics of Post-Territorial ‘Community’”
http://www.davidchandler.org/pdf/chapters/Moscow%20Post-Territorial%20Community.pdf, p.18-9]
This disjunction between the human/ ethical/ global causes of postterritorial¶ political activism and the
capacity to ‘make a difference’ is what¶ makes these individuated claims immediately abstract and
metaphysical¶ – there is no specific demand or programme or attempt to build a¶ collective project. This
is the politics of symbolism. The rise of symbolic¶ activism is highlighted in the increasingly popular
framework of ‘raising¶ awareness’ – here there is no longer even a formal connection between¶ ethical
activity and intended outcomes (Pupavac, 2006). Raising awareness¶ about issues has replaced even the
pretence of taking responsibility¶ for engaging with the world – the act is ethical in-itself. Probably the
most¶ high profile example of awareness raising is the shift from Live Aid, which¶ at least attempted to
measure its consequences in fund-raising terms, to¶ Live 8 whose goal was solely that of raising an
‘awareness of poverty’. The¶ struggle for ‘awareness’ makes it clear that the focus of symbolic politics
is¶ the individual and their desire to elaborate upon their identity – to make¶ us aware of their
‘awareness’, rather than to engage us in an instrumental¶ project of changing or engaging with the outside
world.
To what extent can we speak¶ of post-territorial political community?¶ What are the consequences of this
shift to new unmediated forms of¶ ‘being’ political, away from instrumentality and intellectual
engagement¶ and towards an individuated activist ethics? Is it possible to construct a¶ post-territorial
political community?
Community and self-interest¶ Without individual interests, it is not possible to engage with other¶ people
or take part in, or assist in the constitution of, the life of a political¶ community. The pursuit of interests,
by definition involves the attempt to¶ change the present and thereby necessitates an active engagement
with¶ others and the creation of a collective project. It is only the attempt to¶ convince others that their
interests can similarly be pursued that makes it¶ is necessary to engage with the Other to listen to what the
Other says, to¶ reformulate arguments to convince the Other of a shared Truth, a shared¶ way of seeing and
engaging with the world.
In a world without interests, there can be no human, genuine engagement¶ with the Other or with broader
society. If politics was merely about identity, all that would be required is the expression of this identity.
Activity,¶ performative statements, or the elaboration of self-identity would be¶ all that was required –
this does not require or constitute a political community¶ – all that would be needed was a stage on
which to perform – any¶ engagement with the public would be a passive one. Paradoxically, the¶ politics
of identity assumes that the most that could be asked of the Other is¶ the recognition of our identity. The
claim for recognition or respect involves¶ no engagement with the Other. In fact, it is grounded on
the impossibility¶ of genuine engagement and a radical separation of the Self.
Community and instrumentality¶ The politics of interests implies a grounding of the political in the desire¶
to achieve change rather than merely to express values and identity.¶ It was this desire to change the
present that made the question of state¶ power a vital one, as the levers of state control could be used to
change¶ policy. For this reason, the location of sovereignty was important – but this¶ importance is lost
as soon as the politics of instrumentality are replaced¶ by the non-instrumentalism of individuated ethics.
It is only those who do not have a political project of change who would¶ dismiss the location of power as
irrelevant. State power is only irrelevant if¶ the politics of identity are privileged over the politics of
interests. If politics¶ was merely about identity then the state as instrument becomes not only¶
irrelevant but an embarrassing legacy of the past. Today when national governments¶ are more
inclined to the politics of identity than those of interests,¶ their control of the instruments of power is an
embarrassment, raising the¶ question of how they intend to use these instruments and for what ends.¶
Questions of intentionality and instrumentality are legacies of the old framings¶ of politics which
governments are uneasy with and seek to avoid by¶ denying their capacity to act in the old way (Chandler,
2006). This is done¶ by arguing that power (and responsibility) has been, or should be, devolved¶ upwards
to the European Union and downwards to regional assemblies or¶ local councils and elected majors and
neighbourhood committees.
Legal reform is key to prevent co-option – their resistance may be necessary but it is
not sufficient
Sullivan, the New Republic – editor, 1995 (Andrew, Virtually Normal, pg. 91-93)
Moreover, mere cultural redeployment in a free society is always subject to a cultural response; by expanding the
possibility of queer expression, one also expands the possibility of normal expression. The techniques of ACT UP lend legitimacy to the
techniques of Operation Rescue or radical fundamentalist politics or conservative talk-show hosts or viciously antihomosexual rap lyrics, or
campus cynicism about “political correctness.” A
politics which seeks only to show and not to persuade will only
be as successful as its latest theatrical escapade, and will be as susceptible to the fashions of audiences as any other fad.
Lesbians may be chic in 1993, but so long as cultural impact is one’s only weapon, a spate of family movies may dominate the culture a year
later. If
there is no legal residue, if there is no successful argument, if there is no actual persuasion, then the achievement
will necessarily be transitory. It will not hold. It may even be reversed. Moreover, a cultural strategy as
a political strategy is a dangerous one for a minority—and a small minority at that. Inevitably, the vast
majority of the culture will be at best uninterested and at worst hostile to the whole endeavor. In a
society where the market rules the culture, majorities win the culture wars. And in a society where the state, pace Foucault,
actually does exist, where laws are passed according to rules by which the society operates, culture, in
any case, is not enough. It may be necessary, but it is not sufficient. To achieve actual results, to end
persecution of homosexuals in the military, to allow gay parents to keep their children, to provide basic education about homosexuality in high
schools, to prevent murderers of homosexuals from getting lenient treatment, it is necessary to work through the very channels Foucault and his
followers revile. It
is necessary to conform to certain disciplines in order to reform them, necessary to
speak a certain language before it can say something different, necessary to abandon the anarchy of random
resistance if actual homosexuals are to be protected. As Michael Waizer has written of Foucault, he “stands nowhere and finds no reasons.
Angrily he rattles the bars of the iron cage. But he has no plans or projects for turning the cage into something more like a human home.”
2nc – Link Wall – Generic
The aff participates in anti-politics – they propose the idea of radical restructuring
and doing away with the state – this is fatalistic and precludes collective responses to
global problems and legal solutions to social justice, that’s Bronner and Small.
Collective action is key to prevent extinction from occurring – try or die flips aff.
Abandoning the language of the state cedes the political to elites – only utilizing that
language can challenge state-based oppression.
David E. McClean, New School University Professor, and Society for the Study of Africana
Philosophy President, 2001, “The Cultural Left and the Limits of Social Hope,” http://www.americanphilosophy.org/archives/past_conference_programs/pc2001/Discussion%20papers/david_mcclean.htm
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."
Cultural politics turns healthy skepticism into corrosive paranoia incapable of
sustaining a political project.
Berman, University of Connecticut Law School Associate Professor, 2001
[Paul Schiff, “APPROACHES TO THE CULTURAL STUDY OF LAW: TELLING A LESS SUSPICIOUS STORY: NOTES TOWARD A
NON-SKEPTICAL APPROACH TO LEGAL/CULTURAL ANALYSIS,” 13 Yale J.L. & Human. 95, Lexis]
The second drawback of the hermeneutics of suspicion is perhaps even more important. As some scholars have noted,
the hermeneutics of suspicion can easily slip from healthy skepticism into a kind of rhetorical paranoia.
Paranoia, of course, is a loaded term, and probably a bit unfair. Nevertheless, because it is used frequently in the academic literature
about the hermeneutics of suspicion, I will use it as well - though I want to make clear that I believe paranoia to be the
hypothetical extreme in the movement toward skeptical scholarship. I do not mean to imply that any actual
scholars necessarily display such paranoid logic. Critics of the hermeneutics of suspicion describe the "paranoid style of functioning" 104 as "an
intense, sharply perceptive but narrowly focused mode of attention" that results in an attitude of "elaborate suspiciousness." 105 Paranoid individuals
constantly strive to demystify appearances; they take nothing at face value because "they regard reality as an
obscure dimension hidden from casual observation or participation." 106 On this vision,The obvious is regarded as misleading and as something to be seen through. So, the
paranoid style sees the world as constructed of a web of hints to hidden meaning... . The way in which the paranoid protects fragile autonomy is by insuring, or at least
Such a paranoid style may, over time, have a
potentially corrosive effect on society. 108 Consider the long-term consequences of repeated
exposure to suspicious stories. An appeal to religious ideals is portrayed as an exercise of political power or the result of
deluded magical thinking. A [*122] canonical work of art is revealed to be the product of a patriarchal "gaze." The programs of
politicians are exposed as crass maneuverings for higher office or greater power. 109 The idealistic rhetoric
of judicial opinions is depicted as an after-the-fact justification for the exercise of state-sanctioned violence.
And the life choices of individuals are shown to be responses to psychological neurosis, or social
pathology.All of these are exaggerations, but they increasingly represent the rhetoric that is used to describe human interaction both in
contemporary society and in the past. As Richard Rorty describes, In this vision, the two-hundred-year history of the United States - indeed, the
history of the European and American peoples since the Enlightenment - has been pervaded by hypocrisy and selfdeception. Readers of Foucault often come away believing that no shackles have been broken in
the past two hundred years: the harsh old chains have merely been replaced with slightly more
comfortable ones. Heidegger describes America's success in blanketing the world with modern technology as the spread of a wasteland. Those who find
insisting, that the paranoid's interpretation of events is the interpretation. 107
Foucault and Heidegger convincing often view the United States of America as ... something we must hope will be replaced, as soon as possible, by something utterly
If that is one's viewpoint, it will inevitably be difficult to muster one's energy to believe in
the possibility of positive action in the world, short of revolution (and even revolution is probably
inevitably compromised). As Rorty points out, though the writers of supposedly "subversive" works
"honestly believe that they are serving human liberty," it may ultimately be "almost impossible
to clamber back down from [these works] to a level of abstraction on which one might discuss
the merits of a law, a treaty, a candidate, or a political strategy." 111Of course, one might view this as
different. 110
a positive development. One might think people should stop being lulled into a false sense of
believing that the rhetoric of public life really matters. If people began to view such rhetoric as a construction of entrenched power, so the
argument might go, they would form the nucleus of a truly revolutionary political movement. I doubt that such an eventuality
is likely to occur. Moreover, I am not sure that a culture of suspiciousness is the most effective way
to seek political (or personal) change anyway. Suspicious analysis seeks to expose the dangers of our enchantment with reason or truth or
collectivity, but there are dangers that arise from relentless disenchantment as well. As [*123] Richard K. Sherwin has observed,Without the means of experiencing more
profound enchantments, without communal rituals and social dramas through which the culture's deepest beliefs and values may be brought to life and collectively reenacted,
those beliefs ultimately lose their meaning and die... . Forms of enchantment in the service of deceit, illicit desire, and self-gratification alone must be separated out from
forms of enchantment in the service of feelings, beliefs, and values that we aspire to affirm in light of the self, social, and legal realities they help to construct and maintain.
If all we have is relentless suspicion, we are unlikely to be inspired to create a better world.
Instead, we are likely to feel a kind of collective guilt and self-loathing (or worse a fatalistic apathy) because
of the hopelessly compromised system we have created or to which we have acquiesced. Such
guilt, self-loathing, and apathy is, as Rorty argues, a luxury that agents who need to act in the world
cannot afford to maintain. 113Paul Kahn, in his recent book, The Cultural Study of Law, indirectly suggests a possible response to this critique. Kahn
112
encourages sociolegal scholars not to worry so much about being political or social agents of the sort Rorty describes. Instead, he argues that scholars studying law as a
cultural system should move "away from normative inquiries into particular reforms and toward thick description of the world of meaning that is the rule of law." 114 If we
resist being seduced into focusing on the policy ramifications of our work, Kahn believes, we could better study law the way a religious studies scholar studies religion: not
from the perspective of one who is a part of the practice under consideration, but as an independent observer seeking to understand the cultural meaning of the practice from a
greater distance. Thus, Kahn argues that it is a mistake for scholars to be too invested in legal practice, regardless of whether they see themselves as law's custodians or law's
reformers. Rather, Kahn contends that we would be better off suspending our belief in law's rule altogether, 115 thereby allowing us to analyze legal practice without a
normative agenda.Although I agree with Kahn that sociolegal scholarship need not include explicitly normative policy ramifications to be effective, his approach still requires
Even if we adopt the more distanced "observer" perspective Kahn advocates,
we still must choose to analyze legal and cultural practices through a suspicious lens or [*124] through one
that is more sympathetic. And this choice inevitably has social and political consequences of the sort described
above. Moreover, I am concerned about Kahn's particular articulation of the legal scholar's task: to suspend belief in law's rule.
Such a formulation seems to invite a more skeptical stance than I find appropriate. Nonetheless, there is nothing
about his call to study law as a cultural system rather than as a set of policy prescriptions that requires us to study
law from the perspective of disbelief. Indeed, as I argue below, studying any cultural practice (whether
literature or religion or law) from a perspective of belief - as long as it is not completely uncritical belief may ultimately be more fruitful. Regardless of one's position on that issue, however, it seems to me that,
at the very least, the move toward less normative scholarship cannot extricate scholars from the
fundamental questions that I am discussing.
the scholar to choose a hermeneutic stance.
The debate round is merely a palliative – to claim it is emancipatory is disingenuous.
Bryant 13—philosophy prof at Collin College (Levi, The Paradox of Emancipatory Political Theory,
http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2013/05/31/the-paradox-of-emancipatory-political-theory/)
There’s a sort of Hegelian contradiction at the heart of all academic political theory that has pretensions of being
emancipatory. In a nutshell, the question is that of how this theory can avoid being a sort of commodity . Using Hegel
as a model, this contradiction goes something like this: emancipatory political theory says it’s undertaken for the sake of emancipation from x. Yet with rare exceptions, it is only published in
academicjournals that few have access to, in a jargon that only other academics or the highly literate can understand, and presented only at conferencesthat only other academics generally attend.
Thus , academic emancipatory political theory reveals itself in its truth as something that isn’t aimed at
political change or intervention at all, but rather only as a move or moment in the ongoing autopoiesis of
academia . That is, itfunctions as another line on the CVand is one strategy through which the university
system carries outits autopoiesis or self-reproduction across time. It thus functions– the issue isn’t here one of the
beliefs or intentions of academics, but how things function –as something like a commodity within the academic
system. The function is not to intervene in the broader political system – despite what all of us doing political theory say
and how we think about our work – but rather to carry out yet another iteration of the academic
discourse (there are other ways that this is done, this has just been a particularly effective rhetorical strategy for the autopoiesis of academia in the humanities).
Were the aim political change, then the discourse would have to find a way to reach outside the academy,
but this is precisely what academic politicaltheory cannot do due to the publication and presentation structure,
publish or perish logic, the CV, and so on. To produce political change, the academic political theorist would have to sacrifice his or her erudition or scholarship,
because they would have to presume an audience that doesn’t have a high falutin intellectual background in Hegel, Adorno, Badiou, set theory, Deleuze, Lacan, Zizek,
Foucault (who is one of the few that was a breakaway figure), etc. They would also have to adopt a different platform of communication. Why? Because they would
have to address an audience beyond the confines of the academy, which means something other than academic presses, conferences, journals, etc. (And here I would
say that us Marxists are often the worst of the worst. We engage in a discourse bordering on medieval scholasticism that only schoolmen can appreciate,
which presents
a fundamental contradiction between the form of their discourse– only other experts can understand it –and
the content; they want to produce change). But the academic emancipatory political theorist can’t do either of these things. If they surrender
their erudition and the baroque nature of their discourse, they surrender their place in the academy (notice the way in which Naomi Klein is sneered at in political
theory circles despite the appreciable impact of her work). If they adopt other platforms of communication– and this touches on my last post and the way philosophers
sneer at the idea that there’s a necessity to investigating extra-philosophical conditions of their discourse –then they surrender their labor requirements as people
working within academia. Both options are foreclosed by the sociological conditions of their discourse.
The paradox of emancipatory
academic political discourse is thus that it is formally and functionally apolitical. At the
level of its intention or what it says it aims to effect political change and intervention, but at the level of what it does, it simply reproduces its own
discourse and labor conditions without intervening in broader social fields ( and no, the classroom
doesn’t count ). Unconscious recognition of this paradox might be why, in some corners, we’re seeing the execrable
call to re-stablish “the party”. The party is the academic fantasy of a philosopher-king or an academic avant gard that
simultaneously gets to be an academic and produce political change for all those “dopes and illiterate” that characterize the
people (somehow the issue of how the party eventually becomes an end in itself, aimed solely at perpetuating itself, thereby divorcing itself from the people never
gets addressed by these neo-totalitarians). The idea of the party and of the intellectual avant gard is a symptom of unconscious
recognition of the paradox I’ve recognized here and of the political theorist that genuinely wants to produce change while also recognizing that the
sociological structure of the academy can’t meet those requirements. Given these reflections, one wishes that the academic that’s
learned the rhetoric of politics as an autopoieticstrategy for reproducing the university discourse would be a little less
pompous and self-righteous, but everyone has to feel important and like their the best thing since sliced bread, I guess.
Theory is political withdrawal – it cedes the political – that makes oppression
inevitable – only reinvigorating the left with policy tools and knowledge solve.
Gitlin, Columbia University journalism and sociology professor, 2005
[Todd, former UC Berkley and NYU sociology professor, “The Intellectuals and the Flag”
http://books.google.com/books?id=4EVNgJIinV4C&q=thinking+on+the+American+left#v=onepage&q=
thinking%20on%20the%20American%20left&f=true, p.67-9]
Weak thinking on the American left is especially glaring after September 11, 2001, as I’ll argue in part
III, but this is hardly to say the right has been more impressive at making the world comprehensible. For
decades the right has cultivated its own types of blindness and more than that: having risen to political
power, it has been in a position to make blindness the law of the land. The neoconservatives’ foreign
policy is largely hubris under a veneer of ideals. The antigovernment dogma of deregulation,
privatization, and tax cuts exacerbates economic and social troubles . A culture war against modernity –
against secularism, feminism, and racial justice – flies in the face of the West’s distinctive
contribution to the history of civilization, namely, the rise of individual rights and reason.
To elaborate on these claims is the work of other books. The reasons for the right-wing ascendancy are
many, among them – as I argued in letter 7 of Letters to a Young Activist (2003) – the organizational
discipline that the right cherishes and the left, at least until recently, tends to abhor. The left’s institutions,
in particular, unions, are weak. But my focus here is another reason for the right’s ascendancy: the left’s
intellectual disarmament.
Some of the deficiency is institutional. Despite efforts to come from behind after the 2000 election, there
remain decades’ worth of shortfall in the left’s cultural apparatus. In action-minded think tanks, talk radio
and cable television, didactic newspapers, subsidies for writers, and so on, the right has held most of the
high cards.1 Left and liberal analyses and proposals do emerge from universities and research centers, but
their circulation is usually choked off for lack of focus, imagination, and steady access to mass media –
except in the cheapened forms of punditry and agitprop.
The right’s masterful apparatus for purveying its messages and organizing for power is not the only
reason why the left has suffered defeat after defeat in national politics since the 1960s. The left’s
intellectual stockpile has been badly depleted, and new ideas are more heralded than delivered. When
the left has thought big, it has been clearer about isms to oppose – mainly imperialism and racism – than
about values and policies to further. At that, it has often preferred the denunciatory mode to the analytical,
mustering full-throated opposition rather than full-brained exploration. While it is probably true that many
more reform ideas are dreamt that succeed in circulating through the brain-dead media, the liberal left
conveys little sense of a whole that is more than the sum of its parts. While the right has rather
successfully tarred liberals with the brush of “tax-and-spend,” those thus tarred have often been unsure
whether to reply “It’s not so” or “It is so, we’re proud to say.” A fair generalization is that the left’s
expertise has been constricted in scope, showing little taste for principle and little capacity to imagine a
reconstituted nation. It has been conflicted and unsteady about values. It has tended to disdain any design
for foreign policy other than “U.S. out,” which is no substitute for foreign policy – and inconsistent to
boot when you consider that the left wants the United States to intervene, for examples, to push Israel to
end its occupation of the West Bank.
All this is to say the left has been imprisoned in the closed world of outsider politics. Instead of a
vigorous quest for testable propositions that could actually culminate in reform, the academic left in
particular has nourished what has come to be called “theory”: a body of writing (one can scarcely say its
content consists of propositions) that is, in the main, distracting, vague, self-referential, and wrongheaded. “Theory” is chiefly about itself: “thought to the second power,” as Frederic Jameson defined
dialectical thinking in an early, dazzling American exemplar of the new theoretical style.2 Even when
“theory” tries to reconnect from language and mind to the larger social world, language remains the
preoccupation. Michel Foucault became a rock star of theory in the United States precisely because he
demoted knowledge to a reflex of power, merely the denominator of the couplet “power/knowledge,” yet
his preoccupation was with the knowledge side, not actual social structures. His famous illustrations of
the power of “theory” was built on Jeremy Bentham’s design of an ideal prison, the Panopticon – a model
never built.3 The “linguistic turn” in the social sciences turns out to be its own prison house,
equipped with funhouse mirrors but no exit.
When convenient, “theory” lays claim to objective truth, but in fact the chief criterion by which it
ascended in status was aesthetic, not empirical. Flair matters more than explanatory power. At crucial
junctures “theory” consists of flourishes, intellectual performance pieces: things are said to be so because
the theorist says so, and even if they are not, isn’t it interesting to pretend? But the problem with “theory”
goes beyond opaque writing – an often dazzling concoction of jargon, illogic, and preening. If you
overcome bedazzlement at the audacity and glamour of theory and penetrate the obscurity, you find
circularity and self-justification, often enough (and self-contradictorily) larded with populist
sentimentality about “the people” or forces of resistance.” You see steadfast avoidance of tough
questions. Despite the selective use of the still-prestigious rhetoric of science, the world of “theory”
makes only tangential contact with the social reality it disdains. Politically, it is useless. It amounts to
secession from the world where most people live.
They do politics by being political – that atomizes social change which precludes
movements from formulating.
Chandler, University of Westminster international relations professor, 2007
[David, “The Politics of Post-Territorial ‘Community’”
http://www.davidchandler.org/pdf/chapters/Moscow%20Post-Territorial%20Community.pdf, p.20-1]
Conclusion¶ Is there any way to repose the question of the constitution of political¶ community? Or are the
paradoxical binaries – of instrumentality and¶ indeterminacy, interests and ethics, the territorial and the
global – set to¶ haunt every discussion about how we might be or become political or¶ constitute political
communities?
This paper is not intended to be a nostalgic paean to the old world of¶ collective subjects and national
interests or a call for a revival of territorial¶ state-based politics or even to reject global aspirations: quite
the reverse.¶ Today, politics has been ‘freed’ from the constraints of territorial political¶ community –
governments without coherent policy programmes do not¶ face the constraints of failure or the constraints
of the electorate in any¶ meaningful way; activists, without any collective opposition to relate to, are¶ free
to choose their causes and ethical identities; protest, from Al Qaeda, to¶ anti-war demonstrations, to the
riots in France, is inchoate and atomised.¶ When attempts are made to formally organise opposition, the
ephemeral¶ and incoherent character of protest is immediately apparent.
The decline of territorial political community does not appear to have¶ led to new forms of political
community (in territorial or post-territorial¶ forms), but rather to the individuation of ‘being’ political.
Therefore ‘being¶ political’ today takes the form of individuated ethical activity in the same¶ way as
‘being religious’ takes a highly personal form with the rejection of¶ organised churches. Being religious
and being political are both statements¶ of individual differentiation rather than reflections of social
practices and¶ ways of life. One can not ‘be’ political (anymore than one can ‘be’ religious) except by
elaborating a personal creed or identity – being political or¶ religious today is more likely to distance one
from one’s community, or¶ at least to reflect that perception of distance. The elaboration of our
individual¶ ‘being’, of our identity, signifies the breakdown of community and¶ the organic ties of the
traditional social/political sphere.
It is this atomisation of society and the breakdown of community and¶ the artificial nature of our
individual elaborations of self which makes the¶ personal immediately political and therefore
immediately global. It would¶ therefore seem that to ‘do’ politics, rather than make claims to ‘be’
political,¶ would necessitate the revival of constraints on the freedom of the political.
They exemplify post-territorial politics – expanding what constitutes politics doesn’t
increase political engagement – their engagement is too thin.
Chandler, University of Westminster international relations professor, 2009
[David, “The Global Ideology: Rethinking the Politics of the ‘Global Turn’ in IR”
http://www.davidchandler.org/pdf/journal_articles/Journal%20of%20Int%20Rels%20%20Global%20Ideology%20published.pdf, p.535-7]
While the Cold War discipline of international relations is understood in¶ ideological terms of power and
interests, the critical and constructivist theorists who¶ regularly assert the constitutive nature of theorising
rarely understand this as a socially¶ mediated relationship. Robert Cox’s breakdown of social theorising
into ‘problemsolving¶ approaches’, which restrict themselves to attempts to resolve problems on¶ the
basis of existing interests and relations of power, and ‘critical approaches’, which¶ take an emancipatory
approach,20 has often been reproduced in ways which tend to¶ understand the act of theorising
idealistically.21 Theorising is then seen to construct¶ society in line with the political interests or class
position of the theorist; critical¶ theorising then increasingly becomes a political act or statement in itself
regardless¶ of any link to social agency.22
In this context, critical ‘global’ understandings of community and political interaction¶ were often seen to
be progressive and a challenge to the power and interests¶ of (nation state-based) political elites. In the
1990s, critical theorists led the call for¶ the globalisation of our conceptions of the international sphere,
highlighted in the¶ shift away from understanding security in terms of state security to the security of¶ the
individual.23 It was argued that the expansion of the security referent, from the state¶ to the global level,
and the expansion of our understanding of threats, from narrow¶ military concerns to concerns of
environmental degradation, poverty and women’s¶ rights, would transform the international agenda.
States were seen as barriers to a¶ new, more progressive world order based on shared concerns and
interests. Rather¶ than being the bearers of security, protecting their citizens, states were increasingly¶
conceived of as a threat to their citizens’ security, through genocide, war and their¶ abuse of human
rights.
These critical concerns were swiftly taken up by Western governments, international¶ institutions and
NGOs and, as they did so, globalised visions of security,¶ focusing on securing the needs of individuals
rather than states, became increasingly¶ part of the political mainstream.24 For some theorists, working
within constructivist¶ frameworks, the emergence of global politics has been framed in ways less directly¶
confrontational to the interests of states. Instead, it is argued, Western state political¶ elites have begun to
conceive of their self-interests in a more enlightened way – one¶ which is less confrontational and more
cooperative.25 This shift in the perception of¶ state interests and the manner of their projection in the
international sphere has been¶ understood to be a product of global interaction and the construction of
new norms¶ of behaviour and ideas of global citizenship. These new norms were often seen to be¶ driven
by NGOs and other ‘norm entrepreneurs’ acting in the global political sphere,¶ shaping public perceptions
of the global political agenda and forcing states to respond¶ and to gradually take on board assumptions
about the importance of issues such as human rights and the rule of law.26 Global politics was therefore
often conceived not¶ in geopolitical, territorial terms of realpolitik but in the ethical terms of a
contestation¶ between global approaches and state-based ones, which pitted cosmopolitanism and¶ human
rights advocacy against narrow national interests, which were alleged to hold¶ back the consistent
implementation of emerging global norms.27
Frameworks of global politics in the 1990s tended to contrast the international¶ sphere of progress and
NGO activism with an increasingly moribund domestic¶ sphere of political party competition. In the 1990s
power was still seen to reside at¶ the level of states, even though the agenda was being set by global
interaction and¶ politics operating at the global level. In the 2000s, the globalisation of politics has¶
become increasingly expressed in the erosion of distinctions between the global¶ and the domestic.28 For
radical poststructuralist theorists, the erosion of the barrier¶ between the global and the domestic has been
commonly articulated in terms of the¶ hegemony of neoliberal capitalism, empire, or of biopower. The
undermining of the¶ politics of state-based representation and the globalisation of regulatory power has¶
become the starting assumption for the poststructuralist ‘scaling up’ of Foucault in¶ critiques of global
governmentality.29 If power was located at the global level then¶ resistance was as well, in a direct
challenge to this power.30 This ‘globalisation’ of¶ resistance meant that the focus was not necessarily on
narrow NGO activism and¶ lobbying but could include any form of protest and dissent, as long as it was
viewed¶ from the perspective of global struggle: from ethical shopping to protests against free¶ trade or
the destruction of the rain forests.31
In the dominant frameworks for understanding the globalisation of politics, the¶ problem is not that
politics is represented in global, deterritorialised terms, but that¶ our understandings of the global as the
political sphere for contestation and progress¶ lag behind the economic and social transformations that
have created our globalised¶ world and with it the globalised nature of threats – from global warming to
the global¶ war on terror. This framework closes off any need for questioning the politicisation¶ of the
global level, suggesting that the only questions concern the manner in which¶ we undertake global politics
and/or reorganise our political institutions to adapt to¶ the threats and possibilities of our ‘global world’.
This demonstrates the power of¶ what is here conceptualised as the Global Ideology: an ideological
framework which¶ naturalises and reifies its subject matter, posing the globalisation of politics as a matter ¶
of imposed necessity rather than a social construct which is open to critique.
Demystifying the ‘global’¶ Demystifying the ‘global’ involves articulating the mediating links between
our¶ subjective understanding of the globalised world and the attenuated nature of social¶ and political
struggle. It is possible to understand the globalisation of politics as a¶ social construct without theoretical
positions being directly understood as unmediated¶ reflections of clashing political interests or subject
positions. Critical theorists and¶ constructivists have often tended to conceive of their work as advocacy
on the¶ part of the progressive forces of global civil society in its political struggle against¶ powerful
elites, defending the status quo of state-based international relations. In¶ the same way, critical
poststructuralists tend to understand their work as part of the¶ struggle against the power of liberal
‘empire’ ranged against the radical challenge¶ of the ‘multitude’.32
In these frameworks of understanding global politics, the shift towards the global¶ is seen as indicative of
new lines of political struggle which have replaced those of¶ the territorialised framework of Left and
Right. For liberal and critical theorists,¶ this is the struggle for human rights and emancipation against the
sovereign power¶ of states. For poststructuralist theorists, this is seen as the struggle for autonomy¶ and
difference against the universalising war waged ‘over ways of life itself’ by¶ neoliberal biopolitical
governance. However, these struggles remain immanent ones,¶ in which global political social forces of
progress are intimated but are yet to fully¶ develop. There is a problem of the social agency, the collective
political subject,¶ which can give content to the theorising of global struggle articulated by academic¶
theorists.33
Without a social agency, which can give global politics the content which academic¶ theorists insist is
immanent, there seems to be a weak link in the chain of argument¶ which asserts that the globalising
nature of economic and social transformations has¶ run ahead of our capacities to engage with the world
politically. On the one hand,¶ there appears to be a crude technological determinism at work: somehow,
speeded¶ up communications are held to have transformed social relations to such an extent¶ that we need
new frameworks of social and political theorising and practices. On¶ the other hand, there appears to be a
crude idealism: the enlightened advocates of¶ global progress are held to represent or express the
immanent or arising progressive¶ forces – from global civil society to the ‘multitude’ – which are yet to
make their own¶ appearance. How can the theoretical and practical gap be bridged between assertions¶ of
transformed social relations, which are alleged to have created a deterritorialised¶ world, and the fact that
the social forces, alleged to reflect or be agents of these¶ changes, remain immanent or marginal? It seems
that we live in a world where politics¶ has become globalised in the absence of political struggle
rather than as a result of¶ the expanded nature of collective political engagement.
Their cede the political arguments are backward – their cultural conceptualization
of politics is the reason the state has been ceded – only reinvesting in politics AND
NOT culture can stop the right.
Gitlin, Columbia University journalism and sociology professor, 1997
[Todd, former UC Berkley and NYU sociology professor, Dissent Magazine, “The Anti-Political
Populism of Cultural Studies” Proquest]
Consolation: here is an explanation for the rise of academic cultural studies during precisely the years
when the right has held political and economic power longer and more consistently than at any other time
in more than a half century. Now, in effect, "the cultural is political," and more, it is regarded as central to
the control of political and economic resources. The control of popular culture is held to have become
decisive in the fate of contemporary societies-or at least it is the sphere in which opposition can find
footing, find breathing space, rally the powerless, defy the grip of the dominant ideas, isolate the powers
that be, and prepare for a "war of position" against their dwindling ramparts. On this view, to dwell on the
centrality of popular culture is more than an academic's way of filling her hours; it is a useful certification
of the people and their projects. To put it more neutrally, the political aura of cultural studies is supported
by something like a "false consciousness" premise: the analytical assumption that what holds the ruling
groups in power is their capacity to muffle, deform, paralyze, or destroy contrary tendencies of an
emotional or ideological nature. By the same token, if there is to be a significant "opposition," it must first
find a base in popular culture-and first also turns out to be second, third, and fourth, since popular culture
is so much more accessible, so much more porous, so much more changeable than the economic
and political order. With time, what began as compensation hardened-became institutionalized-into a
tradition. Younger scholars gravitated to cultural studies because it was to them incontestable that culture
was politics. To do cultural studies, especially in connection with identity politics, was the politics they
knew. The contrast with the rest of the West is illuminating. In varying degrees, left-wing intellectuals in
France, Italy, Scandinavia, Germany, Spain and elsewhere retain energizing attachments to Social
Democratic, Green, and other left-wing parties. There, the association of culture with excellence and
traditional elites remains strong. But in the Anglo-American world, including Australia, these conditions
scarcely obtain. Here, in a discouraging time, popular culture emerges as a consolation prize. (The same
happened in Latin America, with the decline of left-wing hopes.) The sting fades from the
fragmentation of the organized left, the metastasis of murderous nationalism, the twilight of socialist
dreams virtually everywhere. Class inequality may have soared, ruthless individualism may have
intensified, the conditions of life for the poor may have worsened, racial tensions may have mounted,
unions and social democratic parties may have weakened or reached an impasse, but never mind. Attend
to popular culture, study it with sympathy, and one need not dwell on unpleasant realities. One need not
be unduly vexed by electoral defeats. One need not be preoccupied by the ways in which the political
culture's center of gravity has moved rightward-or rather, one can put this down to the iron grip of the
established media institutions. One need not even be rigorous about what one opposes and what one
proposes in its place. Is capitalism the trouble? Is it the particular form of capitalism practiced by
multinational corporations in a deregulatory era? Is it patriarchy (and is that the proper term for a society
that has seen an upheaval in relations between women and men in the course of a half-century)? Racism?
Antidemocracy? Practitioners of cultural studies, like the rest of the academic left, are frequently
elusive. Speaking cavalierly of "opposition" and "resistance" permits-rather, cultivates-a
certain sloppiness of thinking, making it possible to remain "left" without having to face the most difficult
questions of political selfdefinition. The situation of cultural studies conforms to the contours of our
political moment. It confirms-and reinforces-the current paralysis: the incapacity of social movements and
dissonant sensibilities to imagine effective forms of public engagement. It substitutes an
obsession with popular culture for coherent economic-political thought or a connection with mobilizable
populations outside the academy and across identity lines. One must underscore that this is not simply
because of cultural studies' default. The default is an effect more than a cause. It has its reasons. The odds
are indeed stacked against serious forward motion in conventional politics. Political power is not only
beyond reach, but functional majorities disdain it, finding the government and all its works
contemptible. Few of the central problems of contemporary civilization are seriously contested within the
narrow band of conventional discourse. Unconventional politics, such as it is, is mostly fragmented and
self-contained along lines of racial, gender, and sexual identities. One cannot say that cultural studies
diverts energy from a vigorous politics that is already in force. Still, insofar as cultural studies makes
claims for itself as an insurgent politics, the field is presumptuous and misleading. Its attempt to
legitimize the ecstasies of the moment confirms the collective withdrawal from democratic hope. Seeking
to find political energies in audiences who function as audiences, rather than in citizens functioning as
citizens, the dominant current in cultural studies is pressed willy-nilly toward an uncritical celebration of
technological progress. It offers no resistance to the primacy of visual and nonlinear culture over the
literary and linear. To the contrary: it embraces technological innovation as soon as the latest
developments prove popular. It embraces the sufficiency of markets; its main idea of the intellect's
democratic commitment is to flatter the audience. Is there a chance of a modest redemption? Perhaps, if
we imagine a harder headed, less wishful cultural studies, free of the burden of imagining itself to be a
political practice. A chastened, realistic cultural studies would divest itself of political pretensions. It
would not claim to be politics. It would not mistake the academy for the larger society. It would be less
romantic about the world-and about itself. Rigorous practitioners of cultural studies should be more
curious about the world that remains to be researched and changed. We would learn more about politics,
economy, and society, and in the process, appreciate better what culture, and cultural study, do not
accomplish. If we wish to do politics, let us organize groups, coalitions, demonstrations, lobbies,
whatever; let us do politics. Let us not think that our academic work is already that.
Their politics is fundamentally conservative – they inherently focus on me-search
instead of collective action.
Chandler, University of Westminster international relations professor, 2007
[David, “The Attraction of Post-Territorial Politics: Ethics and Activism in the International Sphere”
http://www.davidchandler.org/pdf/short_articles/Inaugural%20lecture.pdf, p.2-7]
However, politics is no less important to many of us today. Politics still gives us a sense of social
connection and social rootedness and gives meaning to many of our lives. It is just that the nature and
practices of this politics are different. We are less likely to engage in the formal politics of representation
- of elections and governments - but in post-territorial politics, a politics where there is much less division
between the private sphere and the public one and much less division between national, territorial,
concerns and global ones. This type of politics is on the one hand ‘global’ but, on the other, highly
individualised: it is very much the politics of our everyday lives – the sense of meaning we get from
thinking about global warming when we turn off the taps when we brush our teeth, take our rubbish out
for recycling or cut back on our car use - we might also do global politics in deriving meaning from the
ethical or social value of our work, or in our subscription or support for good causes from Oxfam to
Greenpeace and Christian Aid.¶ I want to suggest that when we do ‘politics’ nowadays it is less the ‘old’
politics, of self-interest, political parties, and concern for governmental power, than the ‘new’ politics of
global ethical concerns. I further want to suggest that the forms and content of this new global approach
to the political are more akin to religious beliefs and practices than to the forms of our social political
engagement in the past. Global politics is similar to religious approaches in three vital respects: 1) global
post-territorial politics are no longer concerned with power, its’ concerns are free-floating and in many
ways, existential, about how we live our lives; 2) global politics revolve around practices with are private
and individualised, they are about us as individuals and our ethical choices; 3) the practice of global
politics tends to be non-instrumental, we do not subordinate ourselves to collective associations or parties
and are more¶ likely to give value to our aspirations, acts, or the fact of our awareness of an issue, as an
end in-itself. It is as if we are upholding our goodness or ethicality in the face of an increasingly
confusing, problematic and alienating world – our politics in this sense are an expression or voice, in
Marx’s words, of ‘the heart in a heartless world’ or ‘the soul of a soulless condition’.¶ The practice of
‘doing politics’ as a form of religiosity is a highly conservative one. As Marx argued, religion was the
‘opium of the people’ - this is politics as a sedative or pacifier: it feeds an illusory view of change at the
expense of genuine social engagement and transformation. I want to argue that global ethical politics
reflects and institutionalises our sense of disconnection and social atomisation and results in irrational and
unaccountable government policy making. I want to illustrate my points by briefly looking at the practices
of global ethics in three spheres, those of radical political activism, government policy making and
academia.¶ Radical activism¶ People often argue that there is nothing passive or conservative about radical
political activist protests, such as the 2003 anti-war march, anti-capitalism and anti-globalisation protests,
the huge march to Make Poverty History at the end of 2005, involvement in the World Social Forums or
the radical jihad of Al-Qaeda. I disagree; these new forms of protest are highly individualised and
personal ones - there is no attempt to build a social or collective movement. It appears that theatrical
suicide, demonstrating, badge and bracelet wearing are ethical acts in themselves: personal statements of
awareness, rather than attempts to engage politically with society.¶ This is illustrated by the ‘celebration of
differences’ at marches, protests and social forums. It is as if people are more concerned with the creation
of a sense of community through differences than with any political debate, shared agreement or
collective purpose. It seems to me that if someone was really concerned with ending war or with ending
poverty or with overthrowing capitalism, that political views and political differences would be quite
important. Is war caused by capitalism, by human nature, or by the existence of guns and other weapons?
It would seem important to debate reasons, causes and solutions, it would also seem necessary to give
those political differences an organisational expression if there was a serious project of social change.¶
Rather than a political engagement with the world, it seems that radical political activism today is a form
of social disengagement – expressed in the anti-war marchers’ slogan of ‘Not in My Name’, or the
assumption that wearing a plastic bracelet or setting up an internet blog diary is the same as engaging in
political debate. In fact, it seems that political activism is a practice which isolates individuals who think
that demonstrating a personal commitment or awareness of problems is preferable to engaging with other
people who are often dismissed as uncaring or brain-washed by consumerism. The narcissistic aspects of
the practice of this type of global politics are expressed clearly by individuals who are obsessed with
reducing their carbon footprint, deriving their idealised sense of social connection from an ever increasing
awareness of themselves and by giving ‘political’ meaning to every personal action.¶ Global ethics appear
to be in demand because they offer us a sense of social connection and meaning while at the same time
giving us the freedom to construct the meaning for ourselves, to pick our causes of concern, and enabling
us to be free of responsibilities for acting as part of a collective association, for winning an argument or
for success at the ballot-box. While the appeal of global ethical politics is an individualistic one, the
lack of success or impact of radical activism is also reflected in its rejection of any form of social
movement or organisation.¶ Governments¶ Strange as it may seem, the only people who are keener on
global ethics than radical activists are political elites. Since the end of the Cold War, global ethics have
formed the core of foreign policy and foreign policy has tended to dominate domestic politics. Global
ethics are at the centre of debates and discussion over humanitarian intervention, ‘healing the scar of
Africa’, the war on terror and the ‘war against climate insecurity’. Tony Blair argued in the Guardian last
week that ‘foreign policy is no longer foreign policy’ (Timothy Garten Ash, ‘Like it or Loath it, after 10
years Blair knows exactly what he stands for’, 26 April 2007), this is certainly true. ¶ Traditional foreign
policy, based on strategic geo-political interests with a clear framework for policy-making, no longer
seems so important. The government is down-sizing the old Foreign and Commonwealth Office where
people were regional experts, spoke the languages and were engaged for the long-term, and provides
more resources to the Department for International Development where its staff are experts in good
causes. This shift was clear in the UK’s attempt to develop an Ethical Foreign Policy in the 1990s – an
approach which openly claimed to have rejected strategic interests for values and the promotion of
Britain’s caring and sharing ‘identity’. Clearly, the projection of foreign policy on the basis of
demonstrations of values and identity, rather than an understanding of the needs and interests of people on
the ground, leads to ill thought-through and short-termist policy-making, as was seen in the ‘value-based’
interventions from Bosnia to Iraq (see Blair’s recent Foreign Affairs article, ‘A Battle for Global Values’,
86:1 (2007), pp.79–90).¶ Governments have been more than happy to put global ethics at the top of the
political agenda for - the same reasons that radical activists have been eager to shift to the global sphere –
the freedom from political responsibility that it affords them. Every government and international
institution has shifted from strategic and instrumental policy-making based on a clear political programme
to the ambitious assertion of global causes – saving the planet, ending poverty, saving Africa, not just
ending war but solving the causes of conflict etc – of course, the more ambitious the aim the less anyone
can be held to account for success and failure. In fact, the more global the problem is, the more
responsibility can be shifted to blame the US or the UN for the failure to translate ethical claims into
concrete results. Ethical global questions, where the alleged values of the UN, the UK, the ‘civilised
world’, NATO or the EU are on the line in ‘wars of choice’ from the war on terror to the war on global
warming lack traditional instrumentality because they are driven less by the traditional interests of
Realpolitik than the narcissistic search for meaning or identity.¶ Governments feel the consequences of
their lack of social connection, even more than we do as individuals; it undermines any attempt to
represent shared interests or cohere political programmes. As Baudrillard suggests, without a connection
to the ‘represented’ masses, political leaders are as open to ridicule and exposure as the ‘Emperor with no
clothes’ (In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, New York: Semiotext(e), 1983, for example). It is this
lack of shared social goals which makes instrumental policy-making increasingly problematic. As Donald
Rumsfeld stated about the war on terror, ‘there are no metrics’ to help assess whether the war is being
won or lost. These wars and campaigns, often alleged to be based on the altruistic claim of the needs and
interests of others, are demonstrations and performances, based on ethical claims rather than responsible
practices and policies. Max Weber once counterposed this type of politics – the ‘ethics of conviction’ – to
the ‘ethics of responsibility’ in his lecture on ‘Politics as a Vocation’. The desire to act on the
international scene without a clear strategy or purpose has led to highly destabilising interventions from
the Balkans to Iraq and to the moralisation of a wide range of issues from war crimes to EU membership
requirements.¶ Academia¶ Today more and more people are ‘doing politics’ in their academic work. This
is the reason for the boom in International Relations study and the attraction of other social sciences to the
global sphere. I would argue that the attraction of IR for many people has not been IR theory but the
desire to practice global ethics. The boom in the IR discipline has coincided with a rejection of Realist
theoretical frameworks of power and interests and the sovereignty/anarchy problematic. However, I
would argue that this rejection has not been a product of theoretical engagement with Realism but an
ethical act of rejection of Realism’s ontological focus.¶ It seems that our ideas and our theories say much
more about us than the world we live in. Normative theorists and Constructivists tend to support the
global ethical turn arguing that we should not be as concerned with ‘what is’ as with the potential for the
emergence of global ethical community. Constructivists, in particular, focus upon the ethical language
which political elites espouse rather than the practices of power. But the most dangerous trends in the
discipline today are those frameworks which have taken up Critical theory and argue that focusing on the
world as it exists is conservative ‘problem-solving’ while the task for critical theorists is to focus on
emancipatory alternative forms of living or of thinking about the world. Critical thought then becomes a
process of wishful thinking rather than one of engagement, with its advocates arguing that we need to
focus on clarifying our own ethical frameworks and biases and positionality before thinking about or
teaching on world affairs; in the process this becomes ‘me-search’ rather than research. We have
moved a long way from Hedley Bull’s perspective that, for academic research to be truly radical, we had
to put our values to the side to follow where the question or inquiry might lead.¶ The inward-looking and
narcissistic trends in academia, where we are more concerned with our ‘reflectivity’ – the awareness of
our own ethics and values - than with engaging with the world, was brought home to me when I asked my
IR students which theoretical frameworks they agreed with most and they replied mostly Critical theory
and Constructivism despite the fact that they thought that states operated on the basis of power and selfinterest in a world of anarchy. Their theoretical preferences were based more on what their choices said
about them as ethical individuals than about how theory might be used to understand and engage with the
world.
2nc – Link – Language of State/McClean
Abandoning the language of the state cedes the political to elites – only utilizing that
language can challenge state-based oppression.
David E. McClean, New School University Professor, and Society for the Study of Africana
Philosophy President, 2001, “The Cultural Left and the Limits of Social Hope,” http://www.americanphilosophy.org/archives/past_conference_programs/pc2001/Discussion%20papers/david_mcclean.htm,
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."
2nc – Link – Paranoia/Berman
Cultural politics turns healthy skepticism into corrosive paranoia incapable of
sustaining a political project.
Berman, University of Connecticut Law School Associate Professor, 2001
[Paul Schiff, “APPROACHES TO THE CULTURAL STUDY OF LAW: TELLING A LESS SUSPICIOUS STORY: NOTES TOWARD A
NON-SKEPTICAL APPROACH TO LEGAL/CULTURAL ANALYSIS,” 13 Yale J.L. & Human. 95, Lexis]
The second drawback of the hermeneutics of suspicion is perhaps even more important. As some scholars have noted,
the hermeneutics of suspicion can easily slip from healthy skepticism into a kind of rhetorical paranoia.
Paranoia, of course, is a loaded term, and probably a bit unfair. Nevertheless, because it is used frequently in the academic literature
about the hermeneutics of suspicion, I will use it as well - though I want to make clear that I believe paranoia to be the
hypothetical extreme in the movement toward skeptical scholarship. I do not mean to imply that any actual
scholars necessarily display such paranoid logic. Critics of the hermeneutics of suspicion describe the "paranoid style of functioning" 104 as "an
intense, sharply perceptive but narrowly focused mode of attention" that results in an attitude of "elaborate suspiciousness." 105 Paranoid individuals
constantly strive to demystify appearances; they take nothing at face value because "they regard reality as an
obscure dimension hidden from casual observation or participation." 106 On this vision,The obvious is regarded as misleading and as something to be seen through. So, the
paranoid style sees the world as constructed of a web of hints to hidden meaning... . The way in which the paranoid protects fragile autonomy is by insuring, or at least
Such a paranoid style may, over time, have a
potentially corrosive effect on society. 108 Consider the long-term consequences of repeated
exposure to suspicious stories. An appeal to religious ideals is portrayed as an exercise of political power or the result of
deluded magical thinking. A [*122] canonical work of art is revealed to be the product of a patriarchal "gaze." The programs of
politicians are exposed as crass maneuverings for higher office or greater power. 109 The idealistic rhetoric
of judicial opinions is depicted as an after-the-fact justification for the exercise of state-sanctioned violence.
And the life choices of individuals are shown to be responses to psychological neurosis, or social
pathology.All of these are exaggerations, but they increasingly represent the rhetoric that is used to describe human interaction both in
contemporary society and in the past. As Richard Rorty describes, In this vision, the two-hundred-year history of the United States - indeed, the
history of the European and American peoples since the Enlightenment - has been pervaded by hypocrisy and selfdeception. Readers of Foucault often come away believing that no shackles have been broken in
the past two hundred years: the harsh old chains have merely been replaced with slightly more
comfortable ones. Heidegger describes America's success in blanketing the world with modern technology as the spread of a wasteland. Those who find
insisting, that the paranoid's interpretation of events is the interpretation. 107
Foucault and Heidegger convincing often view the United States of America as ... something we must hope will be replaced, as soon as possible, by something utterly
If that is one's viewpoint, it will inevitably be difficult to muster one's energy to believe in
the possibility of positive action in the world, short of revolution (and even revolution is probably
inevitably compromised). As Rorty points out, though the writers of supposedly "subversive" works
"honestly believe that they are serving human liberty," it may ultimately be "almost impossible
to clamber back down from [these works] to a level of abstraction on which one might discuss
the merits of a law, a treaty, a candidate, or a political strategy." 111Of course, one might view this as
a positive development. One might think people should stop being lulled into a false sense of
believing that the rhetoric of public life really matters. If people began to view such rhetoric as a construction of entrenched power, so the
argument might go, they would form the nucleus of a truly revolutionary political movement. I doubt that such an eventuality
is likely to occur. Moreover, I am not sure that a culture of suspiciousness is the most effective way
to seek political (or personal) change anyway. Suspicious analysis seeks to expose the dangers of our enchantment with reason or truth or
different. 110
collectivity, but there are dangers that arise from relentless disenchantment as well. As [*123] Richard K. Sherwin has observed,Without the means of experiencing more
profound enchantments, without communal rituals and social dramas through which the culture's deepest beliefs and values may be brought to life and collectively reenacted,
those beliefs ultimately lose their meaning and die... . Forms of enchantment in the service of deceit, illicit desire, and self-gratification alone must be separated out from
forms of enchantment in the service of feelings, beliefs, and values that we aspire to affirm in light of the self, social, and legal realities they help to construct and maintain.
If all we have is relentless suspicion, we are unlikely to be inspired to create a better world.
are likely to feel a kind of collective guilt and self-loathing (or worse a fatalistic apathy) because
of the hopelessly compromised system we have created or to which we have acquiesced. Such
112
Instead, we
guilt, self-loathing, and apathy is, as Rorty argues, a luxury that agents who need to act in the world
cannot afford to maintain. 113Paul Kahn, in his recent book, The Cultural Study of Law, indirectly suggests a possible response to this critique. Kahn
encourages sociolegal scholars not to worry so much about being political or social agents of the sort Rorty describes. Instead, he argues that scholars studying law as a
cultural system should move "away from normative inquiries into particular reforms and toward thick description of the world of meaning that is the rule of law." 114 If we
resist being seduced into focusing on the policy ramifications of our work, Kahn believes, we could better study law the way a religious studies scholar studies religion: not
from the perspective of one who is a part of the practice under consideration, but as an independent observer seeking to understand the cultural meaning of the practice from a
greater distance. Thus, Kahn argues that it is a mistake for scholars to be too invested in legal practice, regardless of whether they see themselves as law's custodians or law's
reformers. Rather, Kahn contends that we would be better off suspending our belief in law's rule altogether, 115 thereby allowing us to analyze legal practice without a
normative agenda.Although I agree with Kahn that sociolegal scholarship need not include explicitly normative policy ramifications to be effective, his approach still requires
Even if we adopt the more distanced "observer" perspective Kahn advocates,
we still must choose to analyze legal and cultural practices through a suspicious lens or [*124] through one
that is more sympathetic. And this choice inevitably has social and political consequences of the sort described
above. Moreover, I am concerned about Kahn's particular articulation of the legal scholar's task: to suspend belief in law's rule.
Such a formulation seems to invite a more skeptical stance than I find appropriate. Nonetheless, there is nothing
about his call to study law as a cultural system rather than as a set of policy prescriptions that requires us to study
law from the perspective of disbelief. Indeed, as I argue below, studying any cultural practice (whether
literature or religion or law) from a perspective of belief - as long as it is not completely uncritical belief may ultimately be more fruitful. Regardless of one's position on that issue, however, it seems to me that,
at the very least, the move toward less normative scholarship cannot extricate scholars from the
fundamental questions that I am discussing.
the scholar to choose a hermeneutic stance.
2nc – Link – Palliative/Bryant
The debate round is merely a palliative – to claim it is emancipatory is disingenuous.
Bryant 13—philosophy prof at Collin College (Levi, The Paradox of Emancipatory Political Theory,
http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2013/05/31/the-paradox-of-emancipatory-political-theory/)
There’s a sort of Hegelian contradiction at the heart of all academic political theory that has pretensions of being
emancipatory. In a nutshell, the question is that of how this theory can avoid being a sort of commodity . Using Hegel
as a model, this contradiction goes something like this: emancipatory political theory says it’s undertaken for the sake of emancipation from x. Yet with rare exceptions, it is only published in
academicjournals that few have access to, in a jargon that only other academics or the highly literate can understand, and presented only at conferencesthat only other academics generally attend.
Thus , academic emancipatory political theory reveals itself in its truth as something that isn’t aimed at
political change or intervention at all, but rather only as a move or moment in the ongoing autopoiesis of
academia . That is, itfunctions as another line on the CVand is one strategy through which the university
system carries outits autopoiesis or self-reproduction across time. It thus functions– the issue isn’t here one of the
beliefs or intentions of academics, but how things function –as something like a commodity within the academic
system. The function is not to intervene in the broader political system – despite what all of us doing political theory say
and how we think about our work – but rather to carry out yet another iteration of the academic
discourse (there are other ways that this is done, this has just been a particularly effective rhetorical strategy for the autopoiesis of academia in the humanities).
Were the aim political change, then the discourse would have to find a way to reach outside the academy,
but this is precisely what academic politicaltheory cannot do due to the publication and presentation structure,
publish or perish logic, the CV, and so on. To produce political change, the academic political theorist would have to sacrifice his or her erudition or scholarship,
because they would have to presume an audience that doesn’t have a high falutin intellectual background in Hegel, Adorno, Badiou, set theory, Deleuze, Lacan, Zizek,
Foucault (who is one of the few that was a breakaway figure), etc. They would also have to adopt a different platform of communication. Why? Because they would
have to address an audience beyond the confines of the academy, which means something other than academic presses, conferences, journals, etc. (And here I would
say that us Marxists are often the worst of the worst. We engage in a discourse bordering on medieval scholasticism that only schoolmen can appreciate,
which presents
a fundamental contradiction between the form of their discourse– only other experts can understand it –and
the content; they want to produce change). But the academic emancipatory political theorist can’t do either of these things. If they surrender
their erudition and the baroque nature of their discourse, they surrender their place in the academy (notice the way in which Naomi Klein is sneered at in political
theory circles despite the appreciable impact of her work). If they adopt other platforms of communication– and this touches on my last post and the way philosophers
sneer at the idea that there’s a necessity to investigating extra-philosophical conditions of their discourse –then they surrender their labor requirements as people
working within academia. Both options are foreclosed by the sociological conditions of their discourse.
The paradox of emancipatory
academic political discourse is thus that it is formally and functionally apolitical. At the
level of its intention or what it says it aims to effect political change and intervention, but at the level of what it does, it simply reproduces its own
discourse and labor conditions without intervening in broader social fields ( and no, the classroom
doesn’t count ). Unconscious recognition of this paradox might be why, in some corners, we’re seeing the execrable
call to re-stablish “the party”. The party is the academic fantasy of a philosopher-king or an academic avant gard that
simultaneously gets to be an academic and produce political change for all those “dopes and illiterate” that characterize the
people (somehow the issue of how the party eventually becomes an end in itself, aimed solely at perpetuating itself, thereby divorcing itself from the people never
gets addressed by these neo-totalitarians). The idea of the party and of the intellectual avant gard is a symptom of unconscious
recognition of the paradox I’ve recognized here and of the political theorist that genuinely wants to produce change while also recognizing that the
sociological structure of the academy can’t meet those requirements. Given these reflections, one wishes that the academic that’s
learned the rhetoric of politics as an autopoieticstrategy for reproducing the university discourse would be a little less
pompous and self-righteous, but everyone has to feel important and like their the best thing since sliced bread, I guess.
2nc – Link – Theory/Gitlin
Theory is political withdrawal – it cedes the political – that makes oppression
inevitable – only reinvigorating the left with policy tools and knowledge solve.
Gitlin, Columbia University journalism and sociology professor, 2005
[Todd, former UC Berkley and NYU sociology professor, “The Intellectuals and the Flag”
http://books.google.com/books?id=4EVNgJIinV4C&q=thinking+on+the+American+left#v=onepage&q=
thinking%20on%20the%20American%20left&f=true, p.67-9]
Weak thinking on the American left is especially glaring after September 11, 2001, as I’ll argue in part
III, but this is hardly to say the right has been more impressive at making the world comprehensible. For
decades the right has cultivated its own types of blindness and more than that: having risen to political
power, it has been in a position to make blindness the law of the land. The neoconservatives’ foreign
policy is largely hubris under a veneer of ideals. The antigovernment dogma of deregulation,
privatization, and tax cuts exacerbates economic and social troubles . A culture war against modernity –
against secularism, feminism, and racial justice – flies in the face of the West’s distinctive
contribution to the history of civilization, namely, the rise of individual rights and reason.
To elaborate on these claims is the work of other books. The reasons for the right-wing ascendancy are
many, among them – as I argued in letter 7 of Letters to a Young Activist (2003) – the organizational
discipline that the right cherishes and the left, at least until recently, tends to abhor. The left’s institutions,
in particular, unions, are weak. But my focus here is another reason for the right’s ascendancy: the left’s
intellectual disarmament.
Some of the deficiency is institutional. Despite efforts to come from behind after the 2000 election, there
remain decades’ worth of shortfall in the left’s cultural apparatus. In action-minded think tanks, talk radio
and cable television, didactic newspapers, subsidies for writers, and so on, the right has held most of the
high cards.1 Left and liberal analyses and proposals do emerge from universities and research centers, but
their circulation is usually choked off for lack of focus, imagination, and steady access to mass media –
except in the cheapened forms of punditry and agitprop.
The right’s masterful apparatus for purveying its messages and organizing for power is not the only
reason why the left has suffered defeat after defeat in national politics since the 1960s. The left’s
intellectual stockpile has been badly depleted, and new ideas are more heralded than delivered. When
the left has thought big, it has been clearer about isms to oppose – mainly imperialism and racism – than
about values and policies to further. At that, it has often preferred the denunciatory mode to the analytical,
mustering full-throated opposition rather than full-brained exploration. While it is probably true that many
more reform ideas are dreamt that succeed in circulating through the brain-dead media, the liberal left
conveys little sense of a whole that is more than the sum of its parts. While the right has rather
successfully tarred liberals with the brush of “tax-and-spend,” those thus tarred have often been unsure
whether to reply “It’s not so” or “It is so, we’re proud to say.” A fair generalization is that the left’s
expertise has been constricted in scope, showing little taste for principle and little capacity to imagine a
reconstituted nation. It has been conflicted and unsteady about values. It has tended to disdain any design
for foreign policy other than “U.S. out,” which is no substitute for foreign policy – and inconsistent to
boot when you consider that the left wants the United States to intervene, for examples, to push Israel to
end its occupation of the West Bank.
All this is to say the left has been imprisoned in the closed world of outsider politics. Instead of a
vigorous quest for testable propositions that could actually culminate in reform, the academic left in
particular has nourished what has come to be called “theory”: a body of writing (one can scarcely say its
content consists of propositions) that is, in the main, distracting, vague, self-referential, and wrongheaded. “Theory” is chiefly about itself: “thought to the second power,” as Frederic Jameson defined
dialectical thinking in an early, dazzling American exemplar of the new theoretical style.2 Even when
“theory” tries to reconnect from language and mind to the larger social world, language remains the
preoccupation. Michel Foucault became a rock star of theory in the United States precisely because he
demoted knowledge to a reflex of power, merely the denominator of the couplet “power/knowledge,” yet
his preoccupation was with the knowledge side, not actual social structures. His famous illustrations of
the power of “theory” was built on Jeremy Bentham’s design of an ideal prison, the Panopticon – a model
never built.3 The “linguistic turn” in the social sciences turns out to be its own prison house,
equipped with funhouse mirrors but no exit.
When convenient, “theory” lays claim to objective truth, but in fact the chief criterion by which it
ascended in status was aesthetic, not empirical. Flair matters more than explanatory power. At crucial
junctures “theory” consists of flourishes, intellectual performance pieces: things are said to be so because
the theorist says so, and even if they are not, isn’t it interesting to pretend? But the problem with “theory”
goes beyond opaque writing – an often dazzling concoction of jargon, illogic, and preening. If you
overcome bedazzlement at the audacity and glamour of theory and penetrate the obscurity, you find
circularity and self-justification, often enough (and self-contradictorily) larded with populist
sentimentality about “the people” or forces of resistance.” You see steadfast avoidance of tough
questions. Despite the selective use of the still-prestigious rhetoric of science, the world of “theory”
makes only tangential contact with the social reality it disdains. Politically, it is useless. It amounts to
secession from the world where most people live.
2nc – Link – Atomization/Chandler
They do politics by being political – that atomizes social change which precludes
movements from formulating.
Chandler, University of Westminster international relations professor, 2007
[David, “The Politics of Post-Territorial ‘Community’”
http://www.davidchandler.org/pdf/chapters/Moscow%20Post-Territorial%20Community.pdf, p.20-1]
Conclusion¶ Is there any way to repose the question of the constitution of political¶ community? Or are the
paradoxical binaries – of instrumentality and¶ indeterminacy, interests and ethics, the territorial and the
global – set to¶ haunt every discussion about how we might be or become political or¶ constitute political
communities?
This paper is not intended to be a nostalgic paean to the old world of¶ collective subjects and national
interests or a call for a revival of territorial¶ state-based politics or even to reject global aspirations: quite
the reverse.¶ Today, politics has been ‘freed’ from the constraints of territorial political¶ community –
governments without coherent policy programmes do not¶ face the constraints of failure or the constraints
of the electorate in any¶ meaningful way; activists, without any collective opposition to relate to, are¶ free
to choose their causes and ethical identities; protest, from Al Qaeda, to¶ anti-war demonstrations, to the
riots in France, is inchoate and atomised.¶ When attempts are made to formally organise opposition, the
ephemeral¶ and incoherent character of protest is immediately apparent.
The decline of territorial political community does not appear to have¶ led to new forms of political
community (in territorial or post-territorial¶ forms), but rather to the individuation of ‘being’ political.
Therefore ‘being¶ political’ today takes the form of individuated ethical activity in the same¶ way as
‘being religious’ takes a highly personal form with the rejection of¶ organised churches. Being religious
and being political are both statements¶ of individual differentiation rather than reflections of social
practices and¶ ways of life. One can not ‘be’ political (anymore than one can ‘be’ religious) except by
elaborating a personal creed or identity – being political or¶ religious today is more likely to distance one
from one’s community, or¶ at least to reflect that perception of distance. The elaboration of our
individual¶ ‘being’, of our identity, signifies the breakdown of community and¶ the organic ties of the
traditional social/political sphere.
It is this atomisation of society and the breakdown of community and¶ the artificial nature of our
individual elaborations of self which makes the¶ personal immediately political and therefore
immediately global. It would¶ therefore seem that to ‘do’ politics, rather than make claims to ‘be’
political,¶ would necessitate the revival of constraints on the freedom of the political.
2nc – Link – Post-Territorial Politics/Chandler
They exemplify post-territorial politics – expanding what constitutes politics doesn’t
increase political engagement – their engagement is too thin.
Chandler, University of Westminster international relations professor, 2009
[David, “The Global Ideology: Rethinking the Politics of the ‘Global Turn’ in IR”
http://www.davidchandler.org/pdf/journal_articles/Journal%20of%20Int%20Rels%20%20Global%20Ideology%20published.pdf, p.535-7]
While the Cold War discipline of international relations is understood in¶ ideological terms of power and
interests, the critical and constructivist theorists who¶ regularly assert the constitutive nature of theorising
rarely understand this as a socially¶ mediated relationship. Robert Cox’s breakdown of social theorising
into ‘problemsolving¶ approaches’, which restrict themselves to attempts to resolve problems on¶ the
basis of existing interests and relations of power, and ‘critical approaches’, which¶ take an emancipatory
approach,20 has often been reproduced in ways which tend to¶ understand the act of theorising
idealistically.21 Theorising is then seen to construct¶ society in line with the political interests or class
position of the theorist; critical¶ theorising then increasingly becomes a political act or statement in itself
regardless¶ of any link to social agency.22
In this context, critical ‘global’ understandings of community and political interaction¶ were often seen to
be progressive and a challenge to the power and interests¶ of (nation state-based) political elites. In the
1990s, critical theorists led the call for¶ the globalisation of our conceptions of the international sphere,
highlighted in the¶ shift away from understanding security in terms of state security to the security of¶ the
individual.23 It was argued that the expansion of the security referent, from the state¶ to the global level,
and the expansion of our understanding of threats, from narrow¶ military concerns to concerns of
environmental degradation, poverty and women’s¶ rights, would transform the international agenda.
States were seen as barriers to a¶ new, more progressive world order based on shared concerns and
interests. Rather¶ than being the bearers of security, protecting their citizens, states were increasingly¶
conceived of as a threat to their citizens’ security, through genocide, war and their¶ abuse of human
rights.
These critical concerns were swiftly taken up by Western governments, international¶ institutions and
NGOs and, as they did so, globalised visions of security,¶ focusing on securing the needs of individuals
rather than states, became increasingly¶ part of the political mainstream.24 For some theorists, working
within constructivist¶ frameworks, the emergence of global politics has been framed in ways less directly¶
confrontational to the interests of states. Instead, it is argued, Western state political¶ elites have begun to
conceive of their self-interests in a more enlightened way – one¶ which is less confrontational and more
cooperative.25 This shift in the perception of¶ state interests and the manner of their projection in the
international sphere has been¶ understood to be a product of global interaction and the construction of
new norms¶ of behaviour and ideas of global citizenship. These new norms were often seen to be¶ driven
by NGOs and other ‘norm entrepreneurs’ acting in the global political sphere,¶ shaping public perceptions
of the global political agenda and forcing states to respond¶ and to gradually take on board assumptions
about the importance of issues such as human rights and the rule of law.26 Global politics was therefore
often conceived not¶ in geopolitical, territorial terms of realpolitik but in the ethical terms of a
contestation¶ between global approaches and state-based ones, which pitted cosmopolitanism and¶ human
rights advocacy against narrow national interests, which were alleged to hold¶ back the consistent
implementation of emerging global norms.27
Frameworks of global politics in the 1990s tended to contrast the international¶ sphere of progress and
NGO activism with an increasingly moribund domestic¶ sphere of political party competition. In the 1990s
power was still seen to reside at¶ the level of states, even though the agenda was being set by global
interaction and¶ politics operating at the global level. In the 2000s, the globalisation of politics has¶
become increasingly expressed in the erosion of distinctions between the global¶ and the domestic.28 For
radical poststructuralist theorists, the erosion of the barrier¶ between the global and the domestic has been
commonly articulated in terms of the¶ hegemony of neoliberal capitalism, empire, or of biopower. The
undermining of the¶ politics of state-based representation and the globalisation of regulatory power has¶
become the starting assumption for the poststructuralist ‘scaling up’ of Foucault in¶ critiques of global
governmentality.29 If power was located at the global level then¶ resistance was as well, in a direct
challenge to this power.30 This ‘globalisation’ of¶ resistance meant that the focus was not necessarily on
narrow NGO activism and¶ lobbying but could include any form of protest and dissent, as long as it was
viewed¶ from the perspective of global struggle: from ethical shopping to protests against free¶ trade or
the destruction of the rain forests.31
In the dominant frameworks for understanding the globalisation of politics, the¶ problem is not that
politics is represented in global, deterritorialised terms, but that¶ our understandings of the global as the
political sphere for contestation and progress¶ lag behind the economic and social transformations that
have created our globalised¶ world and with it the globalised nature of threats – from global warming to
the global¶ war on terror. This framework closes off any need for questioning the politicisation¶ of the
global level, suggesting that the only questions concern the manner in which¶ we undertake global politics
and/or reorganise our political institutions to adapt to¶ the threats and possibilities of our ‘global world’.
This demonstrates the power of¶ what is here conceptualised as the Global Ideology: an ideological
framework which¶ naturalises and reifies its subject matter, posing the globalisation of politics as a matter¶
of imposed necessity rather than a social construct which is open to critique.
Demystifying the ‘global’¶ Demystifying the ‘global’ involves articulating the mediating links between
our¶ subjective understanding of the globalised world and the attenuated nature of social¶ and political
struggle. It is possible to understand the globalisation of politics as a¶ social construct without theoretical
positions being directly understood as unmediated¶ reflections of clashing political interests or subject
positions. Critical theorists and¶ constructivists have often tended to conceive of their work as advocacy
on the¶ part of the progressive forces of global civil society in its political struggle against¶ powerful
elites, defending the status quo of state-based international relations. In¶ the same way, critical
poststructuralists tend to understand their work as part of the¶ struggle against the power of liberal
‘empire’ ranged against the radical challenge¶ of the ‘multitude’.32
In these frameworks of understanding global politics, the shift towards the global¶ is seen as indicative of
new lines of political struggle which have replaced those of¶ the territorialised framework of Left and
Right. For liberal and critical theorists,¶ this is the struggle for human rights and emancipation against the
sovereign power¶ of states. For poststructuralist theorists, this is seen as the struggle for autonomy¶ and
difference against the universalising war waged ‘over ways of life itself’ by¶ neoliberal biopolitical
governance. However, these struggles remain immanent ones,¶ in which global political social forces of
progress are intimated but are yet to fully¶ develop. There is a problem of the social agency, the collective
political subject,¶ which can give content to the theorising of global struggle articulated by academic¶
theorists.33
Without a social agency, which can give global politics the content which academic¶ theorists insist is
immanent, there seems to be a weak link in the chain of argument¶ which asserts that the globalising
nature of economic and social transformations has¶ run ahead of our capacities to engage with the world
politically. On the one hand,¶ there appears to be a crude technological determinism at work: somehow,
speeded¶ up communications are held to have transformed social relations to such an extent¶ that we need
new frameworks of social and political theorising and practices. On¶ the other hand, there appears to be a
crude idealism: the enlightened advocates of¶ global progress are held to represent or express the
immanent or arising progressive¶ forces – from global civil society to the ‘multitude’ – which are yet to
make their own¶ appearance. How can the theoretical and practical gap be bridged between assertions¶ of
transformed social relations, which are alleged to have created a deterritorialised¶ world, and the fact that
the social forces, alleged to reflect or be agents of these¶ changes, remain immanent or marginal? It seems
that we live in a world where politics¶ has become globalised in the absence of political struggle
rather than as a result of¶ the expanded nature of collective political engagement.
2nc – Link – Cultural Politics/Gitlin
Their cede the political arguments are backward – their cultural conceptualization
of politics is the reason the state has been ceded – only reinvesting in politics AND
NOT culture can stop the right.
Gitlin, Columbia University journalism and sociology professor, 1997
[Todd, former UC Berkley and NYU sociology professor, Dissent Magazine, “The Anti-Political
Populism of Cultural Studies” Proquest]
Consolation: here is an explanation for the rise of academic cultural studies during precisely the years
when the right has held political and economic power longer and more consistently than at any other time
in more than a half century. Now, in effect, "the cultural is political," and more, it is regarded as central to
the control of political and economic resources. The control of popular culture is held to have become
decisive in the fate of contemporary societies-or at least it is the sphere in which opposition can find
footing, find breathing space, rally the powerless, defy the grip of the dominant ideas, isolate the powers
that be, and prepare for a "war of position" against their dwindling ramparts. On this view, to dwell on the
centrality of popular culture is more than an academic's way of filling her hours; it is a useful certification
of the people and their projects. To put it more neutrally, the political aura of cultural studies is supported
by something like a "false consciousness" premise: the analytical assumption that what holds the ruling
groups in power is their capacity to muffle, deform, paralyze, or destroy contrary tendencies of an
emotional or ideological nature. By the same token, if there is to be a significant "opposition," it must first
find a base in popular culture-and first also turns out to be second, third, and fourth, since popular culture
is so much more accessible, so much more porous, so much more changeable than the economic
and political order. With time, what began as compensation hardened-became institutionalized-into a
tradition. Younger scholars gravitated to cultural studies because it was to them incontestable that culture
was politics. To do cultural studies, especially in connection with identity politics, was the politics they
knew. The contrast with the rest of the West is illuminating. In varying degrees, left-wing intellectuals in
France, Italy, Scandinavia, Germany, Spain and elsewhere retain energizing attachments to Social
Democratic, Green, and other left-wing parties. There, the association of culture with excellence and
traditional elites remains strong. But in the Anglo-American world, including Australia, these conditions
scarcely obtain. Here, in a discouraging time, popular culture emerges as a consolation prize. (The same
happened in Latin America, with the decline of left-wing hopes.) The sting fades from the
fragmentation of the organized left, the metastasis of murderous nationalism, the twilight of socialist
dreams virtually everywhere. Class inequality may have soared, ruthless individualism may have
intensified, the conditions of life for the poor may have worsened, racial tensions may have mounted,
unions and social democratic parties may have weakened or reached an impasse, but never mind. Attend
to popular culture, study it with sympathy, and one need not dwell on unpleasant realities. One need not
be unduly vexed by electoral defeats. One need not be preoccupied by the ways in which the political
culture's center of gravity has moved rightward-or rather, one can put this down to the iron grip of the
established media institutions. One need not even be rigorous about what one opposes and what one
proposes in its place. Is capitalism the trouble? Is it the particular form of capitalism practiced by
multinational corporations in a deregulatory era? Is it patriarchy (and is that the proper term for a society
that has seen an upheaval in relations between women and men in the course of a half-century)? Racism?
Antidemocracy? Practitioners of cultural studies, like the rest of the academic left, are frequently
elusive. Speaking cavalierly of "opposition" and "resistance" permits-rather, cultivates-a
certain sloppiness of thinking, making it possible to remain "left" without having to face the most difficult
questions of political selfdefinition. The situation of cultural studies conforms to the contours of our
political moment. It confirms-and reinforces-the current paralysis: the incapacity of social movements and
dissonant sensibilities to imagine effective forms of public engagement. It substitutes an
obsession with popular culture for coherent economic-political thought or a connection with mobilizable
populations outside the academy and across identity lines. One must underscore that this is not simply
because of cultural studies' default. The default is an effect more than a cause. It has its reasons. The odds
are indeed stacked against serious forward motion in conventional politics. Political power is not only
beyond reach, but functional majorities disdain it, finding the government and all its works
contemptible. Few of the central problems of contemporary civilization are seriously contested within the
narrow band of conventional discourse. Unconventional politics, such as it is, is mostly fragmented and
self-contained along lines of racial, gender, and sexual identities. One cannot say that cultural studies
diverts energy from a vigorous politics that is already in force. Still, insofar as cultural studies makes
claims for itself as an insurgent politics, the field is presumptuous and misleading. Its attempt to
legitimize the ecstasies of the moment confirms the collective withdrawal from democratic hope. Seeking
to find political energies in audiences who function as audiences, rather than in citizens functioning as
citizens, the dominant current in cultural studies is pressed willy-nilly toward an uncritical celebration of
technological progress. It offers no resistance to the primacy of visual and nonlinear culture over the
literary and linear. To the contrary: it embraces technological innovation as soon as the latest
developments prove popular. It embraces the sufficiency of markets; its main idea of the intellect's
democratic commitment is to flatter the audience. Is there a chance of a modest redemption? Perhaps, if
we imagine a harder headed, less wishful cultural studies, free of the burden of imagining itself to be a
political practice. A chastened, realistic cultural studies would divest itself of political pretensions. It
would not claim to be politics. It would not mistake the academy for the larger society. It would be less
romantic about the world-and about itself. Rigorous practitioners of cultural studies should be more
curious about the world that remains to be researched and changed. We would learn more about politics,
economy, and society, and in the process, appreciate better what culture, and cultural study, do not
accomplish. If we wish to do politics, let us organize groups, coalitions, demonstrations, lobbies,
whatever; let us do politics. Let us not think that our academic work is already that.
2nc – Link – Me-search/Chandler
Their politics is fundamentally conservative – they inherently focus on me-search
instead of collective action.
Chandler, University of Westminster international relations professor, 2007
[David, “The Attraction of Post-Territorial Politics: Ethics and Activism in the International Sphere”
http://www.davidchandler.org/pdf/short_articles/Inaugural%20lecture.pdf, p.2-7]
However, politics is no less important to many of us today. Politics still gives us a sense of social
connection and social rootedness and gives meaning to many of our lives. It is just that the nature and
practices of this politics are different. We are less likely to engage in the formal politics of representation
- of elections and governments - but in post-territorial politics, a politics where there is much less division
between the private sphere and the public one and much less division between national, territorial,
concerns and global ones. This type of politics is on the one hand ‘global’ but, on the other, highly
individualised: it is very much the politics of our everyday lives – the sense of meaning we get from
thinking about global warming when we turn off the taps when we brush our teeth, take our rubbish out
for recycling or cut back on our car use - we might also do global politics in deriving meaning from the
ethical or social value of our work, or in our subscription or support for good causes from Oxfam to
Greenpeace and Christian Aid.¶ I want to suggest that when we do ‘politics’ nowadays it is less the ‘old’
politics, of self-interest, political parties, and concern for governmental power, than the ‘new’ politics of
global ethical concerns. I further want to suggest that the forms and content of this new global approach
to the political are more akin to religious beliefs and practices than to the forms of our social political
engagement in the past. Global politics is similar to religious approaches in three vital respects: 1) global
post-territorial politics are no longer concerned with power, its’ concerns are free-floating and in many
ways, existential, about how we live our lives; 2) global politics revolve around practices with are private
and individualised, they are about us as individuals and our ethical choices; 3) the practice of global
politics tends to be non-instrumental, we do not subordinate ourselves to collective associations or parties
and are more¶ likely to give value to our aspirations, acts, or the fact of our awareness of an issue, as an
end in-itself. It is as if we are upholding our goodness or ethicality in the face of an increasingly
confusing, problematic and alienating world – our politics in this sense are an expression or voice, in
Marx’s words, of ‘the heart in a heartless world’ or ‘the soul of a soulless condition’.¶ The practice of
‘doing politics’ as a form of religiosity is a highly conservative one. As Marx argued, religion was the
‘opium of the people’ - this is politics as a sedative or pacifier: it feeds an illusory view of change at the
expense of genuine social engagement and transformation. I want to argue that global ethical politics
reflects and institutionalises our sense of disconnection and social atomisation and results in irrational and
unaccountable government policy making. I want to illustrate my points by briefly looking at the practices
of global ethics in three spheres, those of radical political activism, government policy making and
academia.¶ Radical activism¶ People often argue that there is nothing passive or conservative about radical
political activist protests, such as the 2003 anti-war march, anti-capitalism and anti-globalisation protests,
the huge march to Make Poverty History at the end of 2005, involvement in the World Social Forums or
the radical jihad of Al-Qaeda. I disagree; these new forms of protest are highly individualised and
personal ones - there is no attempt to build a social or collective movement. It appears that theatrical
suicide, demonstrating, badge and bracelet wearing are ethical acts in themselves: personal statements of
awareness, rather than attempts to engage politically with society.¶ This is illustrated by the ‘celebration of
differences’ at marches, protests and social forums. It is as if people are more concerned with the creation
of a sense of community through differences than with any political debate, shared agreement or
collective purpose. It seems to me that if someone was really concerned with ending war or with ending
poverty or with overthrowing capitalism, that political views and political differences would be quite
important. Is war caused by capitalism, by human nature, or by the existence of guns and other weapons?
It would seem important to debate reasons, causes and solutions, it would also seem necessary to give
those political differences an organisational expression if there was a serious project of social change.¶
Rather than a political engagement with the world, it seems that radical political activism today is a form
of social disengagement – expressed in the anti-war marchers’ slogan of ‘Not in My Name’, or the
assumption that wearing a plastic bracelet or setting up an internet blog diary is the same as engaging in
political debate. In fact, it seems that political activism is a practice which isolates individuals who think
that demonstrating a personal commitment or awareness of problems is preferable to engaging with other
people who are often dismissed as uncaring or brain-washed by consumerism. The narcissistic aspects of
the practice of this type of global politics are expressed clearly by individuals who are obsessed with
reducing their carbon footprint, deriving their idealised sense of social connection from an ever increasing
awareness of themselves and by giving ‘political’ meaning to every personal action.¶ Global ethics appear
to be in demand because they offer us a sense of social connection and meaning while at the same time
giving us the freedom to construct the meaning for ourselves, to pick our causes of concern, and enabling
us to be free of responsibilities for acting as part of a collective association, for winning an argument or
for success at the ballot-box. While the appeal of global ethical politics is an individualistic one, the
lack of success or impact of radical activism is also reflected in its rejection of any form of social
movement or organisation.¶ Governments¶ Strange as it may seem, the only people who are keener on
global ethics than radical activists are political elites. Since the end of the Cold War, global ethics have
formed the core of foreign policy and foreign policy has tended to dominate domestic politics. Global
ethics are at the centre of debates and discussion over humanitarian intervention, ‘healing the scar of
Africa’, the war on terror and the ‘war against climate insecurity’. Tony Blair argued in the Guardian last
week that ‘foreign policy is no longer foreign policy’ (Timothy Garten Ash, ‘Like it or Loath it, after 10
years Blair knows exactly what he stands for’, 26 April 2007), this is certainly true. ¶ Traditional foreign
policy, based on strategic geo-political interests with a clear framework for policy-making, no longer
seems so important. The government is down-sizing the old Foreign and Commonwealth Office where
people were regional experts, spoke the languages and were engaged for the long-term, and provides
more resources to the Department for International Development where its staff are experts in good
causes. This shift was clear in the UK’s attempt to develop an Ethical Foreign Policy in the 1990s – an
approach which openly claimed to have rejected strategic interests for values and the promotion of
Britain’s caring and sharing ‘identity’. Clearly, the projection of foreign policy on the basis of
demonstrations of values and identity, rather than an understanding of the needs and interests of people on
the ground, leads to ill thought-through and short-termist policy-making, as was seen in the ‘value-based’
interventions from Bosnia to Iraq (see Blair’s recent Foreign Affairs article, ‘A Battle for Global Values’,
86:1 (2007), pp.79–90).¶ Governments have been more than happy to put global ethics at the top of the
political agenda for - the same reasons that radical activists have been eager to shift to the global sphere –
the freedom from political responsibility that it affords them. Every government and international
institution has shifted from strategic and instrumental policy-making based on a clear political programme
to the ambitious assertion of global causes – saving the planet, ending poverty, saving Africa, not just
ending war but solving the causes of conflict etc – of course, the more ambitious the aim the less anyone
can be held to account for success and failure. In fact, the more global the problem is, the more
responsibility can be shifted to blame the US or the UN for the failure to translate ethical claims into
concrete results. Ethical global questions, where the alleged values of the UN, the UK, the ‘civilised
world’, NATO or the EU are on the line in ‘wars of choice’ from the war on terror to the war on global
warming lack traditional instrumentality because they are driven less by the traditional interests of
Realpolitik than the narcissistic search for meaning or identity.¶ Governments feel the consequences of
their lack of social connection, even more than we do as individuals; it undermines any attempt to
represent shared interests or cohere political programmes. As Baudrillard suggests, without a connection
to the ‘represented’ masses, political leaders are as open to ridicule and exposure as the ‘Emperor with no
clothes’ (In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, New York: Semiotext(e), 1983, for example). It is this
lack of shared social goals which makes instrumental policy-making increasingly problematic. As Donald
Rumsfeld stated about the war on terror, ‘there are no metrics’ to help assess whether the war is being
won or lost. These wars and campaigns, often alleged to be based on the altruistic claim of the needs and
interests of others, are demonstrations and performances, based on ethical claims rather than responsible
practices and policies. Max Weber once counterposed this type of politics – the ‘ethics of conviction’ – to
the ‘ethics of responsibility’ in his lecture on ‘Politics as a Vocation’. The desire to act on the
international scene without a clear strategy or purpose has led to highly destabilising interventions from
the Balkans to Iraq and to the moralisation of a wide range of issues from war crimes to EU membership
requirements.¶ Academia¶ Today more and more people are ‘doing politics’ in their academic work. This
is the reason for the boom in International Relations study and the attraction of other social sciences to the
global sphere. I would argue that the attraction of IR for many people has not been IR theory but the
desire to practice global ethics. The boom in the IR discipline has coincided with a rejection of Realist
theoretical frameworks of power and interests and the sovereignty/anarchy problematic. However, I
would argue that this rejection has not been a product of theoretical engagement with Realism but an
ethical act of rejection of Realism’s ontological focus.¶ It seems that our ideas and our theories say much
more about us than the world we live in. Normative theorists and Constructivists tend to support the
global ethical turn arguing that we should not be as concerned with ‘what is’ as with the potential for the
emergence of global ethical community. Constructivists, in particular, focus upon the ethical language
which political elites espouse rather than the practices of power. But the most dangerous trends in the
discipline today are those frameworks which have taken up Critical theory and argue that focusing on the
world as it exists is conservative ‘problem-solving’ while the task for critical theorists is to focus on
emancipatory alternative forms of living or of thinking about the world. Critical thought then becomes a
process of wishful thinking rather than one of engagement, with its advocates arguing that we need to
focus on clarifying our own ethical frameworks and biases and positionality before thinking about or
teaching on world affairs; in the process this becomes ‘me-search’ rather than research. We have
moved a long way from Hedley Bull’s perspective that, for academic research to be truly radical, we had
to put our values to the side to follow where the question or inquiry might lead.¶ The inward-looking and
narcissistic trends in academia, where we are more concerned with our ‘reflectivity’ – the awareness of
our own ethics and values - than with engaging with the world, was brought home to me when I asked my
IR students which theoretical frameworks they agreed with most and they replied mostly Critical theory
and Constructivism despite the fact that they thought that states operated on the basis of power and selfinterest in a world of anarchy. Their theoretical preferences were based more on what their choices said
about them as ethical individuals than about how theory might be used to understand and engage with the
world.
AT: Pessimism Good
It is better to have faith in incrementalism – cynicism breeds ineffectiveness.
Tannenbaum, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign social psychology PhD
candidate, 10-10-13
[Melanie, MA in social psychology, “Lady Gaga, You Shouldn’t Be Doing It For The Applause.”
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/psysociety/2013/10/10/lady-gaga-applause/]
Moving to a slightly different (yet related) domain, research
on goal theory also reveals that there are two broad types of
goal orientations. You might have a mastery (or learning) goal, in which your primary focus is on
mastering difficult material, learning and understanding complex topics, and truly improving at a task. Or,
you might have a performance (or ego) goal, in which your primary focus is on demonstrating
competence, avoiding negative evaluations, and publicly showing that you are “good” at something. In
the former, your focus is internal — you are presumably trying to master some kind of skill or material for your own benefit, so you
can genuinely learn and grow, regardless of what others happen to think of your ability or performance. In the latter, your focus is
external — you are presumably focused on the evaluations of others, and worrying more about what they think or say than about your actual
progress. In other words, you might be doing it all for something like applause. ¶ Perhaps unsurprisingly, those two different outlooks on
personality & skills mentioned two paragraphs above predict how people come to form mastery or performance goal orientations. People
with entity views typically prioritize “looking good” over actually developing competence, leading them
to focus on performance (rather than mastery) goals. After all, if you believe that you are born with a set ability
level and it can’t really be altered, it makes more sense to focus on how you appear (trying to maximize your
positive evaluations from others) rather than wasting your time in a futile attempt to change your innate ability level.
Incremental theorists, on the other hand, are more likely to set goals that revolve around learning and increasing competence. Generally, this
becomes a sort of self-fulfilling prophesy: People who believe that they can improve their abilities with
hard work usually end up working harder, and they gain mastery and become better in that domain as a result.¶ In
fact, studies consistently link mastery (or learning) goals to more adaptive outcomes than performance goals.
For example, MBA students who set learning goals (like mastering complex course material) outperform MBA students who set performance
goals (like getting a high GPA). Teenagers
who hold entity beliefs about athletic ability tend to be less motivated
to pursue athletic goals, whereas teens with incremental beliefs are more likely to enjoy sports and
genuinely want to increase their athletic abilities. Holding incremental beliefs is significantly more adaptive for both learning
and performance — believing that you can improve is better for both motivation and enjoyment than
believing that you must be “born” into greatness. This is because people with mastery goals also exhibit higher levels of
intrinsic motivation, self-regulation, persistence in the face of challenge or possible failure, and metacognition (an overarching term for the ways
in which we plan, monitor, and evaluate our progress on important goals to help us ensure that we’re always engaging in the best possible
strategies).¶ As
Carol Dweck (one of the leading researchers on this topic) explains in the video above, all of
this put together makes a lot sense. Even though you might not see the differential effects of these goals in
the face of success, they certainly emerge in the face of failure. People with incremental theories believe
that they are always capable of learning, growing, and improving. As a result, failing on a difficult task is
not necessarily a personal threat. Rather, it might just be a cue that this is a task on which he/she needs to work harder — it is an
opportunity to learn and grow. People with entity theories, however, do not believe that they can truly
change their abilities. Thus, there is no point in responding to criticism or negative feedback by working harder
or persisting on a difficult task — after all, if you can’t improve, what’s the point? As a result, any negative
feedback is seen a threat. Therefore, they are more likely to seek out situations in which they are likely to
excel and “appear” smart or talented. This can be fine for a while, but it severely limits entity theorists’ capacities
to grow and reach their full potential. After all, if you are terrified of negative feedback, you are more likely to give
up on a task when faced with failure and less likely to persist in the face of a challenge.
Optimism is a prerequisite to solvency.
Levine, practicing psychologist and prominent author, 2011
[Bruce, 9-28-11, “How Anti-Authoritarians Can Transcend their Sense of Hopelessness and Fight Back”
http://www.alternet.org/print/story/152565/how_antiauthoritarians_can_transcend_their_sense_of_hopelessness_and_fight_back]
Critical thinking anti-authoritarians see the enormity of the military-industrial complex, the energyindustrial complex and the financial-industrial complex. They see the overwhelming power of the U.S.
ruling class. They see many Americans unaware of the true sources of their oppression or with little knowledge
of the strategies and tactics necessary to overcome it. They see American society lacking the
psychological and cultural building blocks necessary for democratic movements—the self-respect required to reject
the role as a mere subject of power, the collective self-confidence that success is possible, courage, determination, anti-authoritarianism, and
solidarity. They see how the corporatocracy pays back those few Americans who do question, challenge, and resist illegitimate authority with
economic and political marginalization.¶ Critical Thinking, Depression, and Political Passivity¶ Research
shows that a more
accurate notion of one’s powerlessness can result in a greater feeling of helplessness and is associated
with depression. Several classic studies show that moderately depressed people are more critically
thinking than those who are not depressed. Researchers Lauren Alloy and Lyn Abramson, studying
nondepressed and depressed subjects who played a rigged game in which they had no actual control,
found that nondepressed subjects overestimated their contribution to winning, while depressed subjects
more accurately evaluated their lack of control.¶ If you are critical thinking enough to see the reality of just
how much influence the corporatocracy has and how little power you have, then you are going to experience more pain than
those who do not see these truths. To dull this pain, in addition to drugs and other diversions, human beings use
depression and apathy. But these “shutdown strategies” weaken us and create passivity, immobilization
and what Bob Marley called “mental slavery,” which in itself can be humiliatingly painful. And in this
vicious cycle, human beings use even more diversions and shutdown strategies to dull this ever-increasing
pain.¶ When one is in such a debilitating vicious cycle, painful truths about the cause of one’s malaise—
the truths of how we are getting screwed—are not positively energizing. Instead, one may take such truths
as confirmation that pessimism and hopelessness are warranted. The vicious cycle continues.¶ When one
is already in pain and immobilized, there is a reflexive negative reaction to any proposed solution. Solutions
demand effort, and a demand for effort is painful for those with little energy. So, it’s much easier to reflexively dismiss any
solution. Of course, many solutions do deserve to be dismissed, as they may well be naïve.¶ The feeling of hopelessness is a
legitimate one. And hopeless people are turned off by attempts to invalidate their feelings. Is it possible to
validate that feeling of hopelessness while at the same time challenging the wisdom of inactions based on
hopelessness? And is it possible to challenge it in a way that doesn’t insult the intelligence of critical thinkers?¶ Critical Thinking about
Critical Thinking¶ The battle against the corporatocracy demands critical thinking, which results in seeing many ugly
truths about reality. This critical thinking is absolutely necessary. Without it, one is more likely to engage in tactics that
can make matters worse. Critical thinking also means the ability to think critically about one’s pessimism—realizing that pessimism can cripple
the will. Critical thinkers who reflect on their own critical thinking recognize how negativism can cause inaction, which results in maintaining the
status quo.¶ Critical
thinking anti-authoritarians who move into hopelessness can forget that while they may
in fact be better at seeing ugly truths than are many other people, they cannot see everything. Simply put,
critical thinkers sometimes lose their humility.¶ Abraham Lincoln, considered by many historians to be our most critical thinking
president, was also a major depressive. When he was a young man, he became so depressed that twice his friends had to form suicide watches for
him. In the 1850s in the United States, the major battle was less over abolishing slavery than merely stopping the spread of it. Lincoln, who
fought politically to stop the spread of slavery, wrote in 1856 a pessimistic analysis of the North’s chances of winning this fight:¶ This immense,
palpable pecuniary interest, on the question of extending slavery, unites the Southern people, as one man. But it can not be demonstrated that the
North will gain a dollar by restricting it. Moral principle is all, or nearly all, that unites us of the North. Pity ’tis, it is so, but this is a looser bond,
than pecuniary interest. Right here is the plain cause of their perfect union and our want of it. ¶ That slavery would be abolished in the United
States less than a decade after Lincoln’s pessimistic analysis of the difficulty of merely stopping its spread was one of those seeming
impossibilities that became possible because of unforeseen historical events. In the North, there was certainly not enough concern for African
Americans to result in the end of slavery. But less than a decade after Lincoln’s pessimistic analysis about merely stopping the spread of slavery,
one unforeseen event after another resulted in the abolition of slavery.¶ There
are many examples from history of seeming
impossibilities actually happening, examples that compel critical thinkers to rethink whether they are
actually seeing all the possibilities. One recent example is, of course, the Arab spring. Many critical thinkers from that part of the
world remain amazed at the huge revolts in Egypt that toppled the Mubarak tyranny. ¶ The collapse of the Soviet empire seemed impossible to
most Americans up until shortly before it occurred. Most Americans saw only mass resignation within the Soviet Union and its sphere of control.
But the shipyard workers in Gdansk, Poland, did not see their Soviet and Communist Party rulers as the all-powerful forces that Americans did.
And so Polish workers’ Solidarity, by simply refusing to go away, provided a strong dose of morale across Eastern Europe at the same time other
historical events—such as the Soviet Union’s Afghanistan war—weakened their empire.¶ Why Not Just Wait for the Collapse?¶ History tells us
that not just the Soviet empire but all empires ultimately collapse, and so why not just wait for their fall? It is pretty safe to say that the U.S.
military-industrial complex and other oppressive U.S. industrial complexes will ultimately fall. These may be transformed by our own efforts or,
more likely—given Americans’ current state of political passivity—they will fall owing mostly under the weight of their own stupidity. So, if it is
more likely that these will fall under the weight of their own stupidity, why bother with activism?¶ One reason for democratic movements is that
history tells us that not all empires and oppressive institutions fall under the weight of their own stupidity, as some are transformed by a
combination of democratic movements and empire stupidity.¶ There is another reason to work each day on the democracy battlefields at our
workplace, schools, the media, the marketplace, etc. Whether an empire and its oppressive institutions fall under the weight of their own stupidity
or with help from a democratic movement, there must be people around in the aftermath who have what it takes to create and maintain a
democratic society. There must be people who have retained their individual self-respect, collective self-confidence, courage, determination, antiauthoritarianism, and solidarity.¶ The
lesson from history is that tyrannical and dehumanizing institutions are often
more fragile than they appear. We never really know until it happens whether or not we are living in that
time when historical variables are creating opportunities for seemingly impossible change. Maybe in our
lifetime, or our kids’ lifetime, or their kids’ lifetime, the current corporatocracy will fall. It may fall because of the efforts of democratic
movements or because of its own stupidity or some combination.¶ But when
it does fall, the likelihood that it will be replaced
by an enduring democratic society rests on whether there are enough of us with practice in democracy,
enough of us who took seriously the psychological and cultural building blocks of self-respect, collective
self-confidence, courage, determination, anti-authoritarianism, and solidarity. And democratic movements
are the best place to practice creating those psychological and cultural building blocks required for an
enduring democracy.¶ That's why "Occupy Wall Street" makes sense, and that's why I will be at "October 2011" at Freedom Plaza,
Washington D.C. beginning next Thursday, October 6.
Even illusory agency is productive. Imagining possible changes is necessary to
motivate action.
Shove, Lancaster University sociology professor, and Walker, Lancaster University
geography professor, 2007
[Elizabeth and Gordon, “CAUTION! Transitions ahead: politics, practice, and sustainable transition
management” http://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/761/2/A_cautionary_note_on_transition_managementv5.pdf,
p.8]
For academic readers, our commentary argues for loosening the intellectual grip of ‘innovation studies’, for backing off from the nested,
hierarchical multi-level model as the only model in town, and for exploring other social scientific, but also systemic theories of change. The
more we think about the politics and practicalities of reflexive transition management, the more complex
the process appears: for a policy audience, our words of caution could be read as an invitation to abandon
the whole endeavour. If agency, predictability and legitimacy are as limited as we’ve suggested, this might be the only sensible
conclusion.¶ However, we are with Rip (2006) in recognising the value, productivity and everyday necessity of an
‘illusion of agency’, and of the working expectation that a difference can be made even in the face of so
much evidence to the contrary. The outcomes of actions are unknowable, the system unsteerable and the
effects of deliberate intervention inherently unpredictable and, ironically, it is this that sustains concepts of agency and
management. As Rip argues ‘illusions are productive because they motivate action and repair work, and thus
something (whatever) is achieved’ (Rip 2006: 94). Situated inside the systems they seek to influence, governance actors – and
actors of other kinds as well - are part of the dynamics of change: even
if they cannot steer from the outside they are
necessary to processes within.¶ This is, of course, also true of academic life. Here we are, busy critiquing
and analysing transition management in the expectation that somebody somewhere is listening and maybe
even taking notice. If we removed that illusion would we bother writing anything at all? Maybe we need such fictions to keep us
going, and maybe – fiction or no - somewhere along the line something really does happen, but not in
ways that we can anticipate or know.
AT: Can’t Use Master’s Tools
Working from within the system can produce change. Proves solvency and
addresses K of civil society.
James, University of North Carolina Charlotte philosophy professor, 2009
[Robin, Hypatia Volume 24, Issue 2, “Autonomy, Universality, and Playing the Guitar: On the Politics
and Aesthetics of Contemporary Feminist Deployments of the “Master's Tools”” Wiley]
Norma Coates expresses here an ethical and aesthetic quandary we might term a “feminist guilty
pleasure”: liking something one knows one just shouldn't like, since one considers its politics
problematic, if not disgusting. Why would an avowed feminist like this clearly misogynistic work? How
can one have an aesthetic taste for something that is politically disgusting? This is not a new question by
any means, but it is still a contested one. Indeed, Audre Lorde has famously argued that the “the master's
tools will never dismantle the master's house,” just as Laura Mulvey has equally famously called for the
necessity for feminists to abandon mainstream cinematic pleasure as coercive (Mulvey 1975; Lorde
1983). I contend, however, that we should not be too quick to dismiss either the “master's tools” or some
of the “pleasures” we might experience from them. Indeed, when appropriately hacked, the master's tools
in certain situations and under certain criteria might even be very effective tools for feminist, anti-racist
work.¶ Examining two cases—one political, one aesthetic—from the perspective of non-ideal theory, I
will demonstrate concrete instances in which multiply-underprivileged individuals have utilized, for
liberatory ends, the concepts, rhetoric, and methodologies characteristic of what bell hooks terms “the
white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.”1 Judith Butler's recent appeals for “autonomy” and
“universality,” and indie-electro artist Peaches's use of conventionally racist and sexist art forms are all
instances in which “the master's tools” have been productively reappropriated for progressive ends. I
argue that non-ideal theory also helps clarify two conditions that help to distinguish a successful
resignification from a hegemonic rearticulation: first, reappropriation is successful when, as Butler
argues, the very process of an “outsider's” appropriation of “insider” privilege collapses the
insider/outsider or master/marginalized distinction, so the procedure is itself transformative; second,
success is achieved in instances where nothing else does quite what the master's tools “do,” when nothing
is as accessible, effective, affective—or, as in the case of Coates and the Stones, as “sexy”—as
mainstream/conventional discourse.
There is no alternative to the master’s tools – they are always already working in
and through us – reappropriation reverses the dynamic of power.
James, University of North Carolina Charlotte philosophy professor, 2009
[Robin, Hypatia Volume 24, Issue 2, “Autonomy, Universality, and Playing the Guitar: On the Politics
and Aesthetics of Contemporary Feminist Deployments of the “Master's Tools”” Wiley]
In its adoption and modification of Foucaultian–Nietzschean genealogy as the preferred philosophical
methodology, Judith Butler's work can be seen as itself a form of non-ideal theory. Butler's work relies
heavily on Foucault's theory of power, which is itself a non-ideal critique of classical liberal notions of
power. Via an examination of historical documents on education, the military, the penal system, and ‘the
clinic,’ Foucault argues that power is not juridical (as liberalism tells us power is/should be), but also
normative and disciplinary. That is to say, Foucault examined how power actually worked in real-world
institutions, and from this analysis concluded that the liberal story of power qua “repression” was a
hegemonic misrepresentation. Butler picks up on this reconceptualization of power as “disciplinary” and
“productive,” but, more importantly, on Foucault's commitment to genealogical analysis. Asking of a
concept “how it plays, what investments it bears, what aims it achieves, what alterations it undergoes”
(Butler 2004, 180) does not inquire into the truth of the concept so much as ask about its consequences—
that is, how it is mobilized in the real world. Rather than asking what the concept “is,” Butler wants to
know what it does, and what meaning(s) it has in a particular situation. Insofar as it inquires into how an
idea “works,” this is yet another way in which Butler's notion of theory is never far from concrete
engagement with praxis—and, accordingly, from a version of non-ideal theorizing. In my reading, Butler
utilizes this form of non-ideal theory to argue that since nothing can “do”—that is, function as powerfully
or effectively—quite what terms such as “universality” or “autonomy” can do, they can, have been, and
must be appropriated by progressive theory and activism.7 When this appropriation is performed by those
conventionally excluded by or from that idea (l), Butler claims that the term itself is transformed in its
“repetition”; when utilized by the oppressed in this fashion, the “master's tools” are never quite the
“master's tools.”¶ It is this commitment to real-world conditions and consequences, and, indeed, an often
pragmatic framework, that leads Butler to embrace the very “ideals” of classical liberalism that her earlier
work can be seen as deconstructing and critiquing.8 In Undoing Gender (2004), Butler brings this
genealogical methodology to bear on the concept universality—one of those liberal ideals that have,
historically, functioned to mask the marginalization of underprivileged groups. Since our present moment
of both (post–Post) Modernity and feminism is marked most significantly by issues concerning the global
and the multicultural, the notion of “universality” is placed under particular scrutiny. Is “universality”
necessarily and inevitably monocultural (the supposedly “universal” norm can be a norm in reference to
only one privileged culture); put differently, is “absolute” a necessary co-predicate of “universality,” or
can there be such a thing as a plural or internally polyphonous universal? Following Paul Gilroy's analysis
of the limitations of postmodernism,9 Butler finds the binary opposition of the postmodern privileging of
plurality and the modern privileging of unity to be inadequate. Butler's frustration here with both
“modernism” and “postmodernism” is that “passions for foundations [in the case of the former] and
methods [in the case of the latter] sometimes get in the way of an analysis of contemporary political
culture” (Butler 2004, 181). Her commitment is clearly to the concrete world of lived experience, in the
sense that foundations and methods are subordinated to, in a sense, utility: “What can this do for me?”
seems to be her underlying practical concern. Thus, “[a]lthough many feminists have come to the
conclusion that the universal is always a cover for a certain epistemological imperialism, insensitive to
cultural texture and difference,” Butler argues that “the rhetorical power of claiming universality for
rights of sexual autonomy and related rights of sexual orientation within the international human rights
domain appears indisputable” (182). In real political contexts such as the United Nations' declarations on
the rights of women, the language of “universality” might do what no other language can—thus, it would
be advantageous to keep some form of it in play. Accordingly, even though standard liberal norms about
universality and autonomy might be empirically inadequate, Butler argues that “we had better be able to
use that language to secure legal protections and entitlements” (20; emphasis mine), since, practically,
this is the only language institutions of power presently speak.10 Notions such as individual or civil rights
do have a strategic value; problems arise, however, “if we take the definitions of who we are, legally, to
be adequate descriptions of what we are about” (20). Political myths such as “universality” or
“autonomy” are, as myths, useful, because it makes one intelligible to present structures of power; it must
not be forgotten that these are useful fictions, and that problems arise when they are taken as non-fiction.
Thus, while “autonomy” as commonly figured in mainstream liberalism is, for Butler, clearly a myth, its
political salience therein is cause for resignifying (rather than chucking) the term.¶ This is possible, for
Butler, only because “universality” has no necessary or inherent function—the meaning of a term derives
not from some signifier-signified referential logic, but from consensus … and people can always change
their minds and rewrite agreements. Thus, Butler explains that terms such as universality“are never finally
and fully tethered to a single use. The task of reappropriation is to illustrate the vulnerability of these
often compromised terms to an unexpected progressive possibility” (Butler 2004, 179). Universality can
do lots of different things for us, and we can give it lots of different meanings. When we include in the
conversation about universality those who historically have been excluded from it, this
theoretical/practical exercise itself reconfigures the scope, function, and denotation of the term. “[T]he
struggle against those exclusions very often ends up reappropriating those very terms from modernity”
(179) via performative resignification.¶ For Butler, political and theoretical progress occurs when the
master's discourse is not merely expanded to include more people, but is “rearticulated” when “the
excluded speak to and from such a category” (Butler 2004, 13). This resignification is performative: in
Butler's example, the fact that Fanon writes, that is, assumes a “human” task, “he is in and through the
utterance opening up the category to a different future” (13). By “doing” an activity reserved for
“humans,” a category from which Fanon was excluded, Fanon “undoes” the hegemonic sense of the
“human.” As Butler puts it, “[t]hose deemed illegible, unrecognizable, or impossible nevertheless speak
in the terms of the ‘human,’ opening up the term to a history not fully constrained by the existing
differentials of power” (13–14). When those whose exclusion from the full scope of the “universal” or the
“human” speak with reference to and in the name of these very ideals, these terms become something
other than what they were originally. Thus, for Butler, one never uses precisely the same “tool” as the
master does, for this performative resignification by those whose exclusion from the term renders it
consistent doesn't “stretch” the boundaries of the term to make it more inclusive so much as it makes the
term do what, in its conventional formulation, is logically impossible. While Mills argues that “it cannot
be claimed that from the possibility of the extension of ideal theory to previously excluded populations
that this shows the ideal theory is really not exclusionary” (Mills 2004, 177), we can see that this is not
Butler's claim at all. For Butler, this reappropriation is transformative and not merely assimilative because
“when the unreal lays claim to reality … the norms themselves can become rattled, display their
instability, and become open to resignification” (Butler 2004, 27–28). When those excluded from the
system suddenly put themselves in it, this challenges the foundations of the system, and produces an
imperfect reproduction of its imperative.11¶ Butler's notion of autonomy, with its emphasis on
interdependence and the necessary commerce across a very unclear boundary between individual and
society, has highly significant implications for her call to use the “master's tools.” If, as she argues, all
agency arises from one's insertion in networks of power relations, then one must be “recognizable” to the
“master's” system(s) in order to participate in the working(s) of power in the first place. That is to say, in
order to “do” anything, I must necessarily work with the master's tools and let them work on me. “We
come into the world on the condition that the social world is already there, laying the groundwork for us.
This implies,” Butler argues, “that I cannot persist without norms of recognition that support my
persistence” (Butler 2004, 32). I have no choice to use or not use the master's tools—they have been
working on and through me since before I was even born; they constitute the field in and through which I
act. This does not, however, mean that I must use them as they were intended. Indeed, Butler argues that
when one makes appeals to “rights” for a marginalized group, one is not—or should not be—seeking the
extension of the same old concept to a new group (that is, the colonization of the outside, a
domestication), but instead is/should be challenging the very assumptions behind that term, transforming
it in the process of demanding or claiming it.¶ Butler qualifies her call to use the master's tools with what
she calls a “double path”: “we must use this language to assert an entitlement to conditions of life in ways
that affirm the constitutive role of sexuality and gender in political life, and we must also subject our very
categories to critical scrutiny” (Butler 2004, 37–38). This double path sounds a lot like the more
conventional notion of “critique”—a self-reflexive meta-narrative concerned with the limits of the
discourse under question—but it goes beyond this traditional sense of “critique” insofar as the “limits” it
scrutinizes are not only discursive, but also political. If it is the case that norms “are invoked and cited by
bodily practices that also have the capacity to alter norms in the course of their citation” (52), then it is
clear that Butler finds revolutionary capacity in reactionary norms. If this is the case, then, we must ask
“what departures from the norm constitute something other than an excuse or rationale for the continuing
authority of the norm?” (53), for not every instantiation of the norm, obviously, will be revolutionary. By
what criteria do we determine reactionary from revolutionary reworkings of gender norms? Moreover,
“what departures from the norm disrupt the regulatory process itself?” (53)—that is, what sorts of
subversive repetitions don't just reinstall the terms of the norm, but call the norm itself and its modus
operandi into question?12 In response to these questions, I turn to the case of Peaches's reappropriation of
patriarchal gender norms. Her work, read alongside Butler's, fleshes out the two criteria we can use to
distinguish a successful reworking of the “master's tools” from a hegemonic rearticulation of them.
Because her work deals with many of the same themes (sex, sexuality, sexually empowered women) as
Madonna's superficially (but not really) “feminist” work from the 1980s–90s, Peaches's oeuvre is
particularly helpful in distinguishing a genuinely transformative use of the master's tools from one that,
although superficially radical, in fact maintains the status quo. More importantly, if, as Deleuze and
Guattari say, domination “is not an ideological problem” but “a problem of desire” (Deleuze and Guattari
1983, 104), then power functions, at least in part, by making us want and be satisfied by structures that
are counter to our interests; as Coates demonstrates in the epigraph, structures of feeling (such as musical
conventions) are often resistant to intellectual critique, even in politicized intellectuals. As a musician,
Peaches is engaging the “master's tools”—the guitar, cock rock, binary gender—precisely at the level of
desire and structures of feeling. Accordingly, her work helps me move my analysis beyond the more
ideologically oriented work of Mills and Butler toward consideration of problems of desire and affect.
Indeed, it is precisely because power functions at these levels that the second criterion (accessibility,
affectivity) is so important in distinguishing a successful from an unsuccessful reappropriation.
2nr – EXTN – McClean
Impact turn to their method – they take a spectator approach to politics – only
learning the language of policy makers gives us access to the levers of power to
change institutional oppression, that’s McClean.
This is a net benefit to framework – only by engaging the resolution do we learn this
discourse.
If AFF:
Also proves the perm is net better – legal reform may not be sufficient to solve BUT
it is NECESSARY
2nr – EXTN – Berman
Totalizing suspicion dooms their method, that’s Berman. It creates apathy – there is
no longer any reason to take action because everything is inevitably compromised –
it never results in a fruitful discussion of strategies.
If AFF:
Also proves the perm is the best option – totalizing critique fails, but applying a
critical lens to actions is a better strategy to produce change.
2nr – EXTN – Sullivan
The impact is ZERO SOLVENCY – extend Sullivan. Culture changes over time
which makes their strategy transitory – legal reform is necessary to enshrine
change.
****Impacts***
Impact – Progress Roll Back
Use of the state is compatible with its inevitable abandonment – their advocacy risks
a roll back of democracy and rights and dooms any hope for a free society
Chomsky, Professor of Linguistics, MIT, 1997
(Noam, CANADIAN DIMENSION, May 15, 1997, p. online.)
By visions, I mean the conception of a future society that animates what we actually do, a society in
which a decent human being might want to live. By goals, I mean the choices and tasks that are within
reach, that we will pursue one way or another guided by a vision that may be distant and hazy. On all
such matters, our knowledge and understanding are shallow; as in virtually every area of human life,
we proceed on the basis of intuition and experience, hopes and fears. Goals involve hard choices with
very serious human consequences. Goals and visions can appear to be in conflict, and often are.
There's no contradiction in that, as I think we all know from ordinary experience. Let me take my own
case, to illustrate what I have in mind. My personal visions are fairly traditional anarchist ones.
According to this anarchist vision, any structure of hierarchy and authority carries a heavy burden of
justification, whether it involves personal relations or a larger social order. If it cannot bear the burden
-- sometimes it can -- then it is illegitimate and should be dismantled. I share that vision, though it runs
directly counter to my goals. My short-term goals are to defend and even strengthen elements of
state authority which, though illegitimate in fundamental ways, are critically necessary right now
to impede the dedicated efforts to 'roll back' the progress that has been achieved in extending
democracy and human rights. State authority is now under severe attack in the more democratic
societies, but not because it conflicts with the libertarian vision. Rather the opposite: because if offers
(weak) protection to some aspects of that vision. In today's world, I think, the goals of a committed
anarchist should be to defend some state institutions from the attack against them, while trying
at the same time to pry them open to more meaningful public participation -- and ultimately, to
dismantle them in a much more free society; if the appropriate circumstances can be achieved.
Impact – Distancing/Inaccessibility
The alt creates distancing from all of these solutions – voting neg let’s you wipe your
hands clean with inaccessible philosophy instead of pursue actual change.
Johnston, Emory University, 2004
[Adrian, "The Cynic's Fetish: Slavoj Zizek and the Dynamics of Belief,"
http://www.scribd.com/doc/20244451/Johnston-a-The-Cynic-s-Fetish-Slavoj-Zizek-and-the-Dynamicsof-Belief, 1/1]
However, the absence of this type of Lacan-underwritten argument in Žižek’s socio- political thought indicates something important. Following
Lacan, Žižek describes instances of the tactic of “lying in the guise of truth” and points to late-capitalist cynicism as a key example of this (here,
cynically knowing the truth that “the System” is a vacuous sham produces no real change in behavior, no decision to stop acting “as if” this big
Other is something with genuine substantiality).149 Žižek proclaims that, “the starting point of the critique of ideology has to be full
acknowledgement of the fact that it is easily possible to lie in the guise of truth.”150 Although
the Lacanian blurring of the
boundary between theoretical thinking and practical action might very well be completely true,
accepting it as true inevitably risks strengthening a convenient alibi—the creation of this alibi has
long been a fait accompli for which Lacan alone could hardly be held responsible—for the worst
sort of intellectualized avoidance of praxis. Academics can convincingly reassure themselves that
their inaccessible, abstract musings, the publications of which are perused only by their tiny selfenclosed circle of “ivory tower” colleagues, aren’t irrelevant obscurities made possible by tacit
complicity with a certain socio-economic status quo, but, rather, radical political interventions that
promise sweeping changes of the predominating situation. If working on signifiers is the same as working in the
streets, then why dirty one’s hands bothering with the latter? Consequently, if Žižek is to avoid allowing for a lapse
into this comfortable academic illusion, an illusion for which Lacan could all too easily be perverted into offering rationalizing excuses, he must
eventually stipulate a series of “naïve” extra-theoretical/extra- discursive actions (actions that will hopefully become acts after their enactment) as
part of a coherent political platform for the embattled Left. His rejection of Marx’s positive prescriptive program as anachronistic is quite
justified. But, in the wake of Žižek’s clearing of the ground for something New in politics, there is still much to be done. ¶ A brief remark by
Žižek hints that, despite his somewhat pessimistic assessment of traditional Marxism, he basically agrees with the Marxist conviction that the
demise of capitalism is an inevitable, unavoidable historical necessity—“The ultimate answer to the reproach that the radical Left proposals are
utopian should thus be that, today, the true utopia is the belief that the present liberal-democratic capitalist consensus could go on indefinitely,
without radical changes.”151 This hurling of the charge of utopianism back at those making it is quite convincing. In fact, any system
proclaiming to be the embodiment of “the end of history” invariably appears to be utopian. Given what is known about the merciless march of
history, believing that an ultimate, unsurpassable socio-political arrangement finally has arrived is almost impossible. So, one should indeed
accept as true the unlikelihood of capitalism continuing on indefinitely; it must eventually give way to something else, even if this “x” cannot be
envisioned clearly from within the present context. Nonetheless, Žižek’s own theorizing calls for a great deal of cautious reservation about the
consequences of embracing this outlook as true, of falling into the trap of (to invoke this motif once more) lying in the guise of truth. Just as the
combination of a purely negative, critical Marxism with the anticipation of the event of the act-miracle threatens to turn into an intellectual fetish
(in the Žižekian ideological sense of something that renders the present reality bearable), so too might acknowledging the truth of capitalism’s
finitude have the same unfortunate side-effect. One can tolerate today’s capitalism, because one knows that it cannot last forever; one can
passively and patiently wait it out (at one point, Žižek identifies this anticipation of indeterminate change-yet-to-come as a disempowering lure,
although he doesn’t explicitly acknowledge that his own work on ideology sometimes appears to be enthralled by just such a lure152). In both
cases, the
danger is that the very analyses developed by Žižek in his assault upon late-capitalist ideology might
serve to facilitate the sustenance of the cynical distance whose underlying complicity with the
present state of affairs he describes so well.
Impact – New Right
That leads to the rise of a totalitarian new right.
Richard Rorty, Professor of Philosophy @ Stanford, ’98, Achieving our Country
At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed
and start looking around for a strongman to vote for – someone willing to assure them that, once he
is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid blond salesmen, and postmodernist professors
will no longer be calling the shots. A scenario like that of Sinclair Lewis’ novel “It Can’t Happen Here”
may then be played out. For once such a strongman takes office, nobody can predict what will happen.
In 1932, most of the predictions made about what would happen if Hindenburg named Hitler chancellor
were wildly overoptimistic. One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past
forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped our, Jocular
contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words “nigger” and “kike” will once again be
heard in the workplace. All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its
students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having
their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet. But such a renewal of sadism
will not alter the effects of selfishness For after my imagined strongman takes charge, he will quickly
make his peace with the international super-rich, just as Hitler made his with the German
industrialists. He will invoke the glorious memory of the Gulf War to prvoke military adventures which
will generate short term prosperity. He will be a disaster for the country and the world. People will
wonder why there was so little resistance to his evitable rise. Where, they will ask, was the American
Left? Why was it only rightists like Buchanan who spoke to the workers about the consequences of
globalization? Why could not the Left channel the mounting rage of the newly dispossessed? It is often
said that we Americans, at the end of the twentieth century, no longer have a left. Since nobody denies
the existence of what I have called the cultural Left, this amounts to an admission that that Left is unable
to engage in national politics. It is not the sort of left which can be asked to deal with the consequences
of globalization. To get the country to deal with those consequences, the present cultural Left would
have to transform itself by opening relations with the residue of the old reformist Left, and in particular
with the labor unions. It would have to talk much more about money, even at the cost of talking less
about stigma. I have two suggestions about how to effect this transition. The first is that the left
should put a moratorium on theory. It should try to kick its philosophy habit. The second is that
the left should try to mobilize what remains of our pride in being Americans. It should ask the
public to consider how the country of Lincoln and Whitman might be achieved.
Impact – Debate = Prerequisite
Their criticism is irrelevant to policy debate and destroys the value of the ballot
David E. McClean, New School University Professor, and Society for the Study of Africana
Philosophy President, 2001, “The Cultural Left and the Limits of Social Hope,” http://www.americanphilosophy.org/archives/past_conference_programs/pc2001/Discussion%20papers/david_mcclean.htm
[accessed 1-10-7]
There is a lot of philosophical prose on the general subject of social justice. Some of this is quite good,
and some of it is quite bad. What distinguishes the good from the bad is not merely the level of
erudition. Displays of high erudition are gratuitously reflected in much of the writing by those, for
example, still clinging to Marxian ontology and is often just a useful smokescreen which shrouds a
near total disconnect from empirical reality. This kind of political writing likes to make a lot of
references to other obscure, jargon-laden essays and tedious books written by other true believers - the
crowd that takes the fusion of Marxian and Freudian private fantasies seriously. Nor is it the lack of
scholarship that makes this prose bad. Much of it is well "supported" by footnotes referencing a lode
of other works, some of which are actually quite good. Rather, what makes this prose bad is its utter
lack of relevance to extant and critical policy debates, the passage of actual laws, and the
amendment of existing regulations that might actually do some good for someone else. The
writers of this bad prose are too interested in our arrival at some social place wherein we will finally
emerge from our "inauthentic" state into something called "reality." Most of this stuff, of course,
comes from those steeped in the Continental tradition (particularly post-Kant). While that tradition
has much to offer and has helped shape my own philosophical sensibilities, it is anything but
useful when it comes to truly relevant philosophical analysis, and no self-respecting Pragmatist
can really take seriously the strong poetry of formations like "authenticity looming on the ever
remote horizons of fetishization." What Pragmatists see instead is the hope that we can fix some
of the social ills that face us if we treat policy and reform as more important than Spirit and
Utopia.
Like light rain released from pretty clouds too high in the atmosphere, the substance of this prose
dissipates before it can reach the ground and be a useful component in a discussion of medicare
reform or how to better regulate a pharmaceutical industry that bankrupts senior citizens and
condemns to death HIV patients unfortunate enough to have been born in Burkina Faso - and a
regulatory regime that permits this. It is often too drenched in abstractions and references to a
narrow and not so merry band of other intellectuals (Nietzsche, Bataille, Foucault, Lukács,
Benjamin) to be of much use to those who are the supposed subject matter of this preternatural social
justice literature. Since I have no particular allegiance to these other intellectuals, no particular
impulse to carry their water or defend their reputations, I try and forget as much as I can about
their writings in order to make space for some new approaches and fresh thinking about that
important question that always faces us - "What is to be done?" I am, I think, lucky to have
taken this decision before it had become too late.
Impact – Elite Fill-in
The aff’s vision is infinitely worse – rejecting political solutions leads to elite fill-in
resulting in oppression
Carl Boggs, National University Social Science Professor, 2000, “The End of Politics,” p. 86-7
A narrowed and depoliticized public sphere hardly poses a threat to the privileged interests; on the contrary, it is
perfectly consonant with the imperatives of domestic elite control and global capitalist hegemony. A
relatively barren, eviscerated political terrain coincides with a profound weakening of opposition, where
counter agendas to corporate expansion are denied significant institutional leverage and ideological
voice. It is no less true today than in the past that the only force powerful enough to challenge (or even regulate) the corporate domain is, for
better or worse, large-scale governmental power; local islands of social or political opposition, while surely necessary, are too
easily insulated, too cut off from the macro realm of state and economy, to realistically contend for
domestic or global power. While the modern state retains essentially bureaucratic features, in a liberal political system with open
elections and pluralist interest-group representation there is clearly some, at times perhaps extensive, access for popular groups and movements,
and there is generally some possibility for further democratization where conditions permit. But in a profoundly depoliticized society like the
United States where corporatism is so deeply entrenched, a true resurrection of type of old-style politics needed for fundamental social change
would, at this point, be too fantastical to conceive. From this viewpoint, too, modernity can be understood as profoundly two-sided: it produces
more technology, expertise, and widely dispersed modes of information but also instills more powerlessness and alienation from politics, as we
have seen.23 Individuals feel completely overwhelmed by expanding social and institutional leviathans—the global economy, the state,
corporations, the media, bureaucracy-that seem well beyond their reach. Here a generalized retreat from the public sphere, viewed by many as
contaminated and impenetrable, may seem normal enough, even desirable. People
who are frustrated, angry and
disempowered but who still want drastic change may lack the political language to think or act
coherently on the basis of their feelings; they may even want disengagement from the public sphere. In this they remain
fully tied to the staus quo. Others, pushed to the brink and ready to fight back, will most probably do so in a confining
ideological framework that renders most immediate types of action extremely limited and harmless. Still
others, possibly the majority, are so devoid of a sense of political efficacy that they cannot see beyond their own (often all-too-pampered) private
spheres. Therefore, despite the incessant (and easily available) flows of information made possible by the new technology, the
larger
picture remains essentially fixed: popular disenfranchisement spreads even in the midst of a modern
order replete with all the trappings of liberal democracy.
Impact – Empire Strikes Back
Elites will not give up power in response to the aff – the Empire always strikes back
Lohmann, Durban Group for Climate Justice founder and globalization researcher,
90
[Larry, His articles on globalization, racism, environmental conflict in Southeast Asia, and the discourses
of population and neoclassical economics have appeared in journals such as Science as Culture, New
Scientist, Asian Survey, International Journal of Pollution and Environment, Development Dialogue, Red
Pepper, and Watershed, as well as in numerous scholarly books. Lohmann has received degrees from
Cornell and Princeton and has been a visiting fellow at Yale University, Ecologist, Volume 20, No. 3,
May/June, 1990, “Whose Common Future?”, Freely Accessible Science Journals, p. 83-84]
Any alliance which tells us that we must seek consensus, that no opposition is to be brooked to
Brundtland as out Common Leader, or that there is a perfect potential community of interest between,
say a UN bureaucrat and a Sri Lankan subsistence fisherman, is one that deserves sus-picion at the
outset. Consensus-seeking is neither good nor necessary in itself – it may, after all, function
merely to conceal exploitation – but only when it is agreed by all parties after full discussion to
be possible and fruitful.
This is not to denigrate the ambitious professionals associated with the UNCED, but merely to state a
fact. To seek genuine solutions it is necessary to accept, respect and explore differences, to face
causes, and to understand the workings of power. It may well be that parties with wildly
divergent interests can come to agreements on the crisis confronting the planet. Come the
millennium, we may all be able to form one grand coalition. But until then, it is best to remember
the lesson of history: that no matter how warmly it seems to have embraced the slogans of the
rebels, the Empire always strikes back.
[Note: UNCED = United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, Brundtland = Gro
Harlem Brundtland – former Norwegian, Strong = Maurice Strong, Canadian businessperson and
Secretary General of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development]
Social Location Answers
FW/AT: Experience Before Policy
Narratives and experience from people’s social locations should be combined with
policy, not separated from it – this solves all their offense because it proves our FW
interp doesn’t exclude lived experience.
Magee, University of San Francisco law professor, 2009
[Rhonda V, 43 U.S.F. L. Rev. 777, “Symposium: Deconstructing Race: When Reasonable Minds Differ:
Article: Competing Narratives, Competing Jurisprudences: Are Law Schools Racist? and the Case for an
Integral Critical Approach to Thinking, Talking, Writing, and Teaching About Race” Lexis]
The narratives I call for each of us to include in analyses of law-in-context are those which reflect
relevant aspects of all of our lived experiences, and thus shed fuller, more ambient light on all of our lived
experiences in the matter of race and gender in our lives. This is what an anthropologist of law would call
"autoethnographic" reflection. n49 It helps us see the ways that lived experiences shape the life and
meanings of law, and thus, help us to better understand law itself.
Experience from one’s social location can complement policy but it should not
replace it.
D’Cruz, La Trobe University humanities professor, 2008
[Carolyn, “Identity Politics in Deconstruction”
http://books.google.com/books?id=s3XnOapFsR4C&pg=PA45&lpg=PA45&dq=metaphysics+of+presen
ce,+identity+politics&source=bl&ots=t29WoetXdi&sig=4Ia5jZshQP8s9KRF94mIpVobJY&hl=en&sa=X&ei=Io3VUuTVMuzFsATy3oGwDw&ved=0CEIQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=metaphysi
cs%20of%20presence%2C%20identity%20politics&f=true, p.48]
Before leaving this chapter it is important to note that for experience to provide a source of knowledge for
social transformation there must be a reckoning with the different sites of intervention and orders of
analysis in which the experience of subjugated identities matter. Of course the lived experiences of
subjugated identities matter as a source of knowledge when articulating equal opportunity policy,
undertaking community based projects, or trying to redress previous exclusions from curriculum and
canonical texts, although such articulations still take place within the space of a differential process of
signification, for which there needs to be an accounting. Likewise, and as noted earlier, the perspectives
of subjugated lives can help criticize certain institutionalized practices of power/knowledge relations by
exceeding and challenging the existing norms and conventions that categorise identities in particular
ways. But the lived experiences of the subjugated do not automatically provide a better source of
knowledge than its predecessors for providing the grounds of a critical epistemology. For as Kamuf asked
over thirty years ago, when speaking about feminist criticism, ‘from where does it get its faith in the form
of these questions [what is women’s language, literature, style, or experience] to get at truth, if not from
the same central store that supplies humanism with its faith in the universal truth of man?’47 This is to
say, the whole question of grounds is necessarily tied to a reckoning with its complicity with the language
of ontology, which puts the whole presupposition of an intact identity that sources knowledge into
question. Rather than lamenting the necessity of confronting the otherness into which one is inserted, the
space of differance calls for working out and working through the plan of differences and traces that have
inscribed subjugated identities with a call for emancipation into a tradition which we have inherited. This
heritage is not given to us, but asks to be read and translated from competing and sometimes incompatible
codes and imperatives. By placing identity politics within a particular heritage of the emancipatory
promise from which we must choose, the next chapter deals with the ontological limits in which identity
movements order the realms of philosophy and politics in their calls for social transformation.
FW solves narratives.
Lake, University of California San Diego political science professor, 2011
[David, International Studies Quarterly, “Why ’’isms’’ Are Evil: Theory, Epistemology, and Academic
Sects as Impediments to Understanding and Progress” Wiley, p.466]
Epistemologically, there is perhaps an even deeper divide that is, unfortunately,¶ not so easily bridged.
The nomothetic vs narrative divide cuts through¶ all of the social sciences and possibly beyond. This
divide endures because¶ scholars—either innately or through socialization—find one form of
explanation¶ more intellectually satisfying than the other. Yet, in international studies, we have¶ reified
this divide and, as with our theories, have formed mutually exclusive¶ churches. Rather than claiming one
or the other epistemology is always and¶ everywhere superior, we should recognize that both are valid
and perhaps even¶ complementary paths to understanding. The question is not which approach is¶
inherently superior, but which yields greater insights under what circumstances.¶ The second major
section below takes up epistemology and its consequences for¶ professional practice and knowledge.
Turn – Social Location – Structures Key
Structures are key – not individuals.
Tonn, University of Maryland communication professor, 2005
[Mari Boor, Rhetoric & Public Affairs 8.3, “Taking Conversation, Dialogue, and Therapy Public” Project
Muse]
Approaching public controversies through a conversational model informed by therapy also enables
political inaction in two respects. First, an open-ended process lacking mechanisms for closure thwarts
progress toward resolution. As Freeman writes of consciousness raising, an unstructured, informal discussion [End
Page 418] "leaves people with no place to go and the lack of structure leaves them with no way of getting there."70
Second, the therapeutic impulse to emphasize the self as both problem and solution ignores structural
impediments constraining individual agency. "Therapy," Cloud argues, "offers consolation rather than
compensation, individual adaptation rather than social change, and an experience of politics that is
impoverished in its isolation from structural critique and collective action. " Public discourse
emphasizing healing and coping, she claims, "locates blame and responsibility for solutions in the private
sphere. "71¶ Clinton's Conversation on Race not only exemplified the frequent wedding of public dialogue and
therapeutic themes but also illustrated the failure of a conversation-as-counseling model to achieve
meaningful social reform. In his speech inaugurating the initiative, Clinton said, "Basing our self-esteem on the ability to look down
on others is not the American way . . . Honest dialogue will not be easy at first . . . Emotions may be rubbed raw, but we must begin." Tempering
his stated goal of "concrete solutions" was the caveat that "power cannot compel" racial "community," which "can come only from the human
spirit."72¶ Following
the president's cue to self-disclose emotions, citizens chiefly aired personal experiences
and perspectives during the various community dialogues. In keeping with their talk-show formats, the forums
showcased what Orlando Patterson described as "performative 'race' talk," "public speech acts" of denial, proclamation, defense,
exhortation, and even apology, in short, performances of "self" that left little room for productive public
argument. 73 Such personal evidence overshadowed the "facts" and "realities" Clinton also had promised to
explore, including, for example, statistics on discrimination patterns in employment, lending, and
criminal justice or expert testimony on cycles of dependency, poverty, illegitimacy, and violence. ¶
Whereas Clinton had encouraged "honest dialogue" in the name of "responsibility" and "community," Burke argues that
"The Cathartic Principle" often produces the reverse. "[C]onfessional," he writes, "contains in itself a kind of
'personal irresponsibility,' as we may even relieve ourselves of private burdens by befouling the
public medium." More to the point, "a thoroughly 'confessional' art may enact a kind of 'individual
salvation at the expense of the group,'" performing a "sinister function, from the standpoint of
overall-social necessities."74 Frustrated observers of the racial dialogue—many of them African
Americans—echoed Burke's concerns. Patterson, for example, noted, "when a young Euro-American woman spent nearly five
minutes of our 'conversation' in Martha's Vineyard . . . publicly confessing her racial insensitivities, she was directly unburdening herself of all
There was nothing to argue about. "75 Boston Globe columnist Derrick Z. Jackson invoked the
of a talking cure for
racial ailments that included neither exhaustive racial data nor concrete goals. "The game," wrote Jackson, "is
to get 'rid' of responsibility for racism while doing nothing to solve it." 77
sorts of racial guilt feeling.
game metaphor communication theorists often link to [End Page 419] skills in conversation,76 voicing suspicion
Individual actions fail.
Tonn, University of Maryland communication professor, 2005
[Mari Boor, Rhetoric & Public Affairs 8.3, “Taking Conversation, Dialogue, and Therapy Public” Project
Muse]
Fourth, a
communicative model that views public issues through a relational, personal, or therapeutic lens
nourishes hegemony by inviting political inaction. Whereas the objective of conventional public
argument is achieving an instrumental goal such as a verdict or legislation, the aim of social conversation
generally stops with self-expression. As Schudson puts it, "Conversation has no end outside itself." 39
Similarly, modeling therapeutic paradigms that trumpet "talking cures" can discourage a search for political
solutions to public problems by casting cathartic talk as sufficient remedy. As Campbell's analysis of consciousnessraising groups in the women's liberation movement points out, "[S]olutions must be structural, not merely personal , and
analysis must move beyond personal experience and feeling . . . Unless such transcendence occurs,
there is no persuasive campaign . . . [but] only the very limited realm of therapeutic, small group
interaction."40¶ Finally, and related, a therapeutic framing of social problems threatens to locate the source and
solution to such ills solely within the individual , the "self-help" on which much therapy rests. A postmodern therapeutic
framing of conflicts as relational misunderstandings occasioned by a lack of dialogue not only assumes that familiarity inevitably breeds
caring (rather than, say, irritation or contempt) but, more importantly, provides cover for ignoring the structural
dimensions of social problems such as disproportionate black [End Page 412] poverty. If objective reality is unavoidably a fiction,
as Sheila McNamee claims, all suffering can be dismissed as psychological rather than based in real, material
circumstance, enabling defenders of the status quo to admonish citizens to "heal" themselves.
AT: Situated Knowledge/Social Location
Situated knowledge doesn’t come first.
Conway, Penn State University philosophy professor, 1997
[Daniel, “Nietzsche and the political” http://www.amazon.com/Nietzsche-Political-Thinking-DanielConway/dp/0415100682, p.135-6]
This preference is clearly political in nature, and Haraway
makes no pretense of aspiring to epistemic purity or
foundational innocence. For Haraway, any epistemic privilege necessarily implies a political (i.e., situated)
preference. Her postmodern orientation elides the boundaries traditionally drawn between politics and epistemology, and thus renders otiose
the ideal of epistemic purity. All perspectives are partial, all standpoints situated—including those of feminist theorists. It is
absolutely crucial to Haraway's postmodern feminist project that we acknowledge her claims about
situated knowledge as themselves situated within the political agenda she sets for postmodern feminism;
feminist theorists must therefore accept and accommodate the self-referential implications of their own
epistemic claims. ¶ The political agenda of postmodern feminism thus assigns to (some) subjugated
standpoints a political preference or priority. Haraway, for example, believes that some subjugated
standpoints may be more immediately revealing, especially since they have been discounted and excluded for so long. They
may prove especially useful in coming to understand the political and psychological mechanisms whereby the patriarchy discounts the radically
situated knowledges of others while claiming for its own (situated) knowledge an illicit epistemic privilege: ¶ The standpoints of the subjugated ...
are savvy to modes of denial through repression, forgetting, and disappearing acts— ways of being nowhere while claiming to sec
comprehensively. The subjugated have a decent chance to be on to the god-trick and all its dazzling—and, therefore, blinding—illuminations.34 ¶
But these subjugated standpoints do not afford feminist theorists an epistemically privileged view of the
world, independent of the political agendas they have established. Reprising elements of Nietzsche's psychological
profile of the "slave" type, Haraway warns against the ¶ serious danger of romanticizing and/or appropriating the
vision of the less powerful while claiming to see from their positions. To see from below is neither easily
learned nor unproblematic, even if "we" "naturally" inhabit the great underground terrain of subjugated knowledges. The
positionings of the subjugated are not exempt from critical re-examination, decoding, deconstruction, and
interpretation; that is, from both semiological and hermeneutic modes of critical enquiry. The standpoints
of the subjugated are not "innocent" positions.35 ¶ A subjugated standpoint may shed new light on the
ways of an oppressor, but it in no way renders superfluous or redundant the standpoint of the oppressor.
Because neither standpoint fully comprises the other, the aggregation of the two would move both parties
(or a third party) closer to a more objective understanding of the world. If some feminists have political reasons for
disavowing this project of aggregation, or for adopting it selectively, then they must pursue their political agenda at the expense of the greater
objectivity that they might otherwise have gained.
The referencing of personal experience before anything else to determine the
validity of argument is solipsism – it stifles dialogue and is reductionist which is why
people have stopped using it – arguments beyond those our positionalities reveal to
us are relevant and bracketing them out destroys efforts for change.
Bridges, University of East Anglia centre for applied education research, 2001
[David, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Vol. 35, No. 3, “The Ethics of Outsider Research” EBSCO,
p.372-82]
First, it
is argued that only those who have shared in, and have been part of, a particular experience can
understand or can properly understand (and perhaps `properly' is particularly heavily loaded here) what it is like. You need to be a
woman to understand what it is like to live as a woman; to be disabled to understand what it is like to live as a disabled person etc. Thus Charlton
writes of `the innate inability of able-bodied people, regardless of fancy credentials and awards, to understand the disability experience' (Charlton,
1998, p. 128).
Charlton's choice of language here is indicative of the rhetorical character which these arguments tend to assume. This arises perhaps from the
strength of feeling from which they issue, but it warns of a need for caution in their treatment and acceptance. Even if able-bodied people have
this `inability' it is difficult to see in what sense it is `innate'. Are all credentials `fancy' or might some (e.g. those reflecting a sustained, humble
and patient attempt to grapple with the issues) be pertinent to that ability? And does Charlton really wish to maintain that there is a single
experience which is the experience of disability, whatever solidarity disabled people might feel for each other?
The understanding that any of us have of our own conditions or experience is unique and special, though recent work on personal
narratives also shows that it is itself multi-layered and inconstant, i.e. that we have and can provide many different understandings even of our
own lives (see, for example, Tierney, 1993). Nevertheless, our own understanding has a special status: it provides among other things a data
source for others' interpretations of our actions; it stands in a unique relationship to our own experiencing; and no one else can have quite the
same understanding. It is also plausible that people who share certain kinds of experience in common stand in a special position in terms of
understanding those shared aspects of experience. However,
once this argument is applied to such broad categories as
`women' or `blacks', it has to deal with some very heterogeneous groups; the different social, personal and
situational characteristics that constitute their individuality may well outweigh the shared characteristics; and
there may indeed be greater barriers to mutual understanding than there are gateways.
These arguments , however, all risk a descent into solipsism : if our individual understanding is so
particular, how can we have communication with or any understanding of anyone else? But, granted
Wittgenstein's persuasive argument against a private language (Wittgenstein, 1963, perhaps more straightforwardly presented in Rhees, 1970),
we cannot in these circumstances even describe or have any real understanding of our own condition in
such an isolated world. Rather it is in talking to each other, in participating in a shared language, that we
construct the conceptual apparatus that allows us to understand our own situation in relation to others, and
this is a construction which involves understanding differences as well as similarities.
Besides, we
have good reason to treat with some scepticism accounts provided by individuals of their own
experience and by extension accounts provided by members of a particular category or community of people. We know that such accounts
can be riddled with special pleading, selective memory, careless error, self-centredness, myopia, prejudice and a
good deal more. A lesbian scholar illustrates some of the pressures that can bear, for example, on an insider
researcher in her own community:
As an insider, the lesbian has an important sensitivity to offer, yet she is also more vulnerable than the non-lesbian
researcher, both to the pressure from the heterosexual world--that her studies conform to previous works and describe lesbian reality in terms of
its relationship with the outside-and to
pressure from the inside, from within the lesbian community itself--that her
studies mirror not the reality of that community but its self-protective ideology. (Kreiger, 1982, p. 108)
In other words, while
individuals from within a community have access to a particular kind of understanding of
their experience, this does not automatically attach special authority (though it might attach special interest) to
their own representations of that experience. Moreover, while we might acknowledge the limitations of the
understanding which someone from outside a community (or someone other than the individual who is the focus of the research)
can develop, this does not entail that they cannot develop and present an understanding or that such
understanding is worthless . Individuals can indeed find benefit in the understandings that others offer of
their experience in, for example, a counselling relationship, or when a researcher adopts a supportive role with teachers engaged in reflection on
or research into their own practice. Many have echoed the plea of the Scottish poet, Robert Burns (in `To a louse'):
O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us To see oursels as others see us!3
--even if they might have been horrified with what such power revealed to them. Russell argued that it was the
function of philosophy (and why not research too?) `to suggest many possibilities which enlarge our thoughts and free them from the tyranny of
custom . . .It keeps alive our sense of wonder by showing familiar things in an unfamiliar aspect' (Russell, 1912, p. 91). `Making the familiar
strange', as Stenhouse called it, often requires the assistance of someone unfamiliar with our own world who can look at our taken-for-granted
experience through, precisely, the eye of a stranger. Sparkes (1994) writes very much in these terms in describing his own research, as a white,
heterosexual middleaged male, into the life history of a lesbian PE teacher. He describes his own struggle with the question `is
it possible
for heterosexual people to undertake research into homosexual populations?' but he concludes that being a
`phenomenological stranger' who asks `dumb questions' may be a useful and illuminating experience for the
research subject in that they may have to return to first principles in reviewing their story. This could, of course be an elaborate piece of selfjustification, but it is interesting that someone like Max Biddulph, who writes from a gay/bisexual standpoint, can quote this conclusion with
apparent approval (Biddulph, 1996).
People from outside a community clearly can have an understanding of the experience of those who are
inside that community. It is almost certainly a different understanding from that of the insiders. Whether it is of any
value will depend among other things on the extent to which they have immersed themselves in the world of the other and portrayed it in its
richness and complexity; on the empathy and imagination that they have brought to their enquiry and writing; on whether their stories are honest,
responsible and critical (Barone, 1992). Nevertheless, this value will also depend on qualities derived from the researchers' externality: their
capacity to relate one set of experiences to others (perhaps from their own community); their outsider perspective on the structures which
surround and help to define the experience of the community; on the reactions and responses to that community of individuals and groups
external to it.4
Finally, it must surely follow that if we hold that a researcher, who (to take the favourable case) seeks honestly, sensitively and with humility to
understand and to represent the experience of a community to which he or she does not belong, is incapable of such understanding and
representation, then how can he or she understand either that same experience as mediated through the research of someone from that
community? The argument which excludes the outsider from understanding a community through the effort of their
own research, a fortiori excludes the outsider from that understanding through the secondary source in the form of the effort of an insider
researcher or indeed any other means. Again, the
point can only be maintained by insisting that a particular (and itself
ill-defined) understanding is the only kind of understanding which is worth having.
The epistemological argument (that outsiders cannot understand the experience of a community to which they do not belong)
becomes an ethical argument when this is taken to entail the further proposition that they ought not therefore attempt to research that
community. I hope to have shown that this argument is based on a false premise . Even if the premise were sound,
however, it would not necessarily follow that researchers should be prevented or excluded from attempting
to understand this experience, unless it could be shown that in so doing they would cause some harm. This is indeed part of the
argument emerging from disempowered communities and it is to this that I shall now turn.
III OUTSIDERS IMPORT DAMAGING FRAMEWORKS OF UNDERSTANDING
Frequent in the literature about research into disability, women's experience, race and homosexuality is the claim that
people from outside these particular communities will import into their research, for example, homophobic, sexist or racist
frameworks of understanding, which damage the interests of those being researched.
In the case of research into disability it has been argued that outsider researchers carry with them assumptions that the problem of
disability lies with the disabled rather than with the society which frames and defines disability. `The essential problem of recent anthropological
work on culture and disability is that it perpetuates outmoded beliefs and continues to distance research from lived oppression' (Charlton, 1998, p.
27). By contrast: `a growing number of people with disabilities have developed a consciousness that transforms the notion and concept of
disability from a medical condition to a political and social condition' (Charlton, 1998, p.17). Charlton goes on to criticise, for example, a
publication by Ingstad and Reynolds Whyte (1995), Disability and Culture. He claims that, although it does add to our understanding of how the
conceptualisation and symbolisation of disability takes place, `its language is and perspective are still lodged in the past. In the first forty pages
alone we find the words suffering, lameness, interest group, incapacitated, handicapped, deformities. Notions of oppression, dominant culture,
justice, human rights, political movement, and selfdetermination are conspicuously absent' (Charlton, 1998 p. 27).
Discussing the neo-colonialism of outsider research into Maori experience, Smith extends this type of claim to
embrace the wider methodological and metaphysical framing of outsider research: `From an indigenous perspective Western
research is more than just research that is located in a positivist tradition. It is research which brings to bear, on any study of indigenous peoples,
a cultural orientation, a set of values, a different conceptualization of such things as time, space and subjectivity, different and competing theories
of knowledge, highly specialized forms of language, and structures of power' (Smith, 1999, p. 42).5
This position requires, I think, some qualification. First, researchers are clearly not immune from some of the damaging and
prejudicial attitudes on matters of race, sexuality, disability and gender which are found among the rest of the population, though I might hope
that their training and experience might give them above-average awareness of these issues and above-average alertness to their expression in
their own work. Even where such attitudes remain in researchers' consciousness, this intelligent self-awareness and social sensitivity mean on the
whole that they are able to deploy sufficient self-censorship not to expose it in a damaging way. Researchers may thus remain morally culpable
for their thoughts, but, at least, communities can be spared the harm of their expression. It is also a matter of some significance that researchers
are more exposed than most to public criticism, not least from critics from within these disempowered communities, when such prejudices do
enter and are revealed in their work. If they employ the rhetoric of, for example, anti-racist or anti-sexist conviction, they are at least in their
public pronouncements exposed to the humiliation of being hoisted by their own petard. It is difficult to see the fairness in excluding all outsider
researchers on the a priori supposition of universal prejudice. It is better, surely, to expose it where it is revealed and, if absolutely necessary, to
debar individuals who ignore such criticism and persist in using the privilege of their research position to peddle what can then only be regarded
it is plainly not the case that Western research is located
exclusively (as is implied) in a positivist tradition, even if this tradition has been a dominant one .
Phenomenology, ethnography, life history, even, more recently, the use of narrative fiction and poetry as forms of
research representation, are all established ingredients of the educational research worlds in the UK, USA or Australasia.
as damaging and prejudicial propaganda. Secondly,
Contemporary research literature abounds with critiques of positivism as well as examples of its continuing expression.
I have placed much weight in these considerations on the importance of any research being exposed to
criticism --most importantly, perhaps, but by no means exclusively by the people whose experience it claims
to represent. This principle is not simply an ethical principle associated with the obligations that a
researcher might accept towards participants in the research, but it is a fundamental feature of the processes of
research and its claims to command our attention. It is precisely exposure to, modification through and
survival of a process of vigorous public scrutiny that provides research with whatever authority it can claim. In
contemporary ethnographic research, case-study and life-history research, for example, this expectancy of exposure to correction
and criticism is one which runs right through the research process. The methodological requirement is for
participants to have several opportunities to challenge any prejudices which researchers may bring with them: at the point
where the terms of the research are first negotiated and they agree to participate (or not); during any conversations or interviews that take place in
the course of the research; in responding to any record which is produced of the data gathering; in response to any draft or final publication.
engagement with a researcher provides any group with what is potentially a richly educative opportunity: an
opportunity to open their eyes and to see things differently. It is, moreover, an opportunity which any
researcher worth his or her salt will welcome.
Indeed,
Not all researchers or research processes will be as open as are described here to that educative opportunity, and not all
participants (least of all those who are self-defining as `disempowered') will feel the confidence to take them even if they are there. This may
be seen as a reason to set up barriers to the outsider researcher, but they can and should more often be seen as
problems for researchers and participants to address together in the interests of their mutual understanding and
benefit.
Notwithstanding these considerations, one of the chief complaints coming out of disempowered communities is that this kind of mutual interest and benefit is precisely what is lacking in their experience of research. It is to this
consideration that I shall now turn. IV OUTSIDERS EXPLOIT INSIDER PARTICIPANTS IN THE COMMUNITIES THEY RESEARCH Ellen describes how fieldwork has become `a rite of passage by which the novice is
transformed into the rounded anthropologist and initiated into the ranks of the profession'Ða ritual by which `the student of anthropology dies and a professional anthropologist is born' �Ellen, 1984, p. 23). This is a reminder that
research can carry benefits to the researcher which go beyond those associated with the `pure' pursuit of understanding. As participants in research become more aware of this, their attitudes towards research and researchers can,
understandably, change. The following observation was made by a woman from a community that had experienced several waves of enthusiastic researchers: The kind of behaviour researchers have towards locals tells us that they just
want to exploit them and take from them their ideas and information. It also tells us that they don't really care at all. They want the information to use in front of a group of people at home, so that they can be seen as clever academics.
Then in the end they publish books, reviews, articles etc in order to spread their popularities. So what is this, and what is research really about? Not all researchers are exploiters, but most are, and I think it is time up now for this, and
that these researchers should also be exploited by local people. �Florence Shumba, quoted in Wilson, 1992, p. 199) Researchers who are sensitive to this issue typically look for ways to counter the imbalance of benefit. They will
sometimes discuss with participants ways in which the research could be designed to benefit all parties, by, for example, ensuring that it addresses issues on which the participants need information as well as the researchers or by
providing data that the research participants can use independently and for their own purposes. In the absence of any other perceived benefit, some schools in the UK have responded to researchers' requests for access and time for
interviews by proposing to charge by the hour for teachers' time. Of course sometimes participants will be persuaded to participate on the grounds that some other people whose interests they care aboutÐ pupils in schools, for
example, or children currently excluded from educationÐwill secure the benefit of the research, but there has to be the link between something which they perceive to be a benefit �albeit altruistically) and the commitment which they
are asked to make. These illustrations of the terms of engagement between researchers and their participants present a picture of a trade in benefit, the negotiation of a utilitarian equation of mutual happiness and, perhaps, pain, though
one in which higher satisfactions �e.g. new insights and the improvements to the future education of children) have a place alongside lower ones �a bit of self-publicity or cash in the school fund). Questions of exploitation, in
Kantian terms of treating people as means rather than ends �see Kant, 1964)6 come in if, as is sometimes alleged, researchers use their positions of authority or their sophistication to establish relationships in which the benefits are
very one-sided in their favour. This distinction between the utilitarian principle and the Kantian one is crucial here. The utilitarian principle might require us to measure in the scales a much wider community of benefit. If, for
example, the researcher could show that, even though the Maori community he or she was researching experienced the inconvenience of the research without the benefit, thousands of other people would benefit from it, then the
utilitarian equation might provide justification for the research. But this is precisely one of the weaknesses of the utilitarian principle of the greatest happiness of the greatest numberÐat least when it is applied with this sort of
simplicity. It requires either a broader take on the utilitarian principle �which might observe that a programme of action which allocates all the benefits to one group and all the `pain' to another will not be conducive to the greatest
aggregation of happiness) or the invoking of something closer to the Kantian principle, which would demand that we do not exploit one group of people to the exclusive benefit of another. Researchers seeking collaboration with
participants in disempowered communities have essentially two forms of appealÐto their self-interest or to their generosity. Either they need to see some benefit to themselves which is at least roughly commensurate to the effort that
is required of them �or in some cases the value of what they have to offer); or they need knowingly to contribute out of their own benevolence towards the researcher or others whom they believe the research will benefit. In this
second case, the researcher is placed in something of the position of the receiver of a gift and he or she needs to recognise consequently the quite elaborate ethical apparatus that surrounds such receipt. There is a particular `spirit' in
which we might be expected to receive a gift: a spirit of gratitude, of humility, of mutuality in the relationship. There may also be a network of social expectations, which flow from such givingÐof being in thrall to the giver, of being
in his or her debtÐbut on the whole anyone contributing to an educational research project would be naõÈve to assume that such `debts' might be repaid. Most of the time, researchers are in fact inviting the generosity of their
participants, and perhaps there is something more ethically elevated in responding to such generosity with a true spirit of gratitude and a recognition of the mutuality of relationship which binds giver and receiver, than in seeking to
establish a trade in dubious benefits. Smith �1999) provides a wonderful picture of the combination of spirit and benefits that might be involved in establishing this relationship �as well as a whole new angle on the notion of
`empowerment'!) when she outlines the range of issues on which a researcher approaching a Maori community might need to satisfy them: `Is her spirit clear? Does he have a good heart? What other baggage are they carrying? Are
they useful to us? Can they fix up our generator? Can they actually do anything?' �Smith, 1999, p.10). Perhaps all educational researchers should be required to satisfy participants on these questions. I conclude that the possibility that
outsider educational research may be conducted in an exploitative manner is not an argument for obstructing it comprehensively, but it is an argument for requiring that it be conducted under an appropriate set of principles and
obligations and in a proper spirit. `Qualitative researchers', argued Stake, `are guests in the private spaces of the world. Their manners should be good and their code of ethics strict' �Stake, 1998, p.103). Any community may
legitimately reject a researcher �insider or outsider) who fails to establish and conduct relationships under these requirements. In this field, ethics is never far removed from politics. This essay has focused on the relationship between
educational researchers and communities that are self-defined as `disempowered' but has not really addressed the issue of power. At the heart of the objections to outsider research is a view that such research, far from challenging and
removing such disempowerment, operates to reinforce it. It is this argument which I shall now address. V OUTSIDERS' RESEARCH DISEMPOWERS INSIDERS At least one of the arguments against outsider research into selfdefined `disempowered' sections of the population is made independently of the measure of sensitivity and care, which the outsider researchers demonstrate in its conduct. `If we have learned one thing from the civil rights movement
in the US', wrote Ed Roberts, a leading figure in the Disability Rights Movement �DRM), `it's that when others speak for you, you lose' �quoted in Driedger, 1989, p. 28). Roberts' case is in part that for so long as such groups depend
on outsiders to represent them on the wider stage, they will be reinforcing both the fact and the perception of their subordination and dependency as well as exposing themselves to potential misrepresentation. They have to break the
vicious circle of dependencyÐand that means taking control for themselves of the ways in which their experience is represented more widely: The DRM's demand for control is the essential theme that runs through all its work,
regardless of political-economic or cultural di�erences. Control has universal appeal for DRM activists because their needs are everywhere conditioned by a dependency born of powerlessness, poverty, degradation, and
institutionalisation. This dependency, saturated with paternalism, begins with the onset of disability and continues until death. �Charlton, 1998, p. 3) Outsider researchers sometimes persuade themselves that they are acting in an
emancipatory way by `giving voice to' neglected or disenfranchised sections of the community. Their research may indeed push the evident voice of the researcher far into the background as he or she `simply presents', perhaps as
large chunks of direct transcription and without commentary, what participants have to say. But, as Reinharz has warned, this is by no means as simple as it might appear: To listen to people is to empower them. But if you want to
hear it, you have to go hear it, in their space, or in a safe space. Before you can expect to hear anything worth hearing, you have to examine the power dynamics of the space and the social actors . . . Second, you have to be the person
someone else can talk to, and you have to be able to create a context where the person can speak and you can listen. That means we have to study who we are and who we are in relation to those we study . . . Third, you have to be
willing to hear what someone is saying, even when it violates your expectations or threatens your interests. In other words, if you want someone to tell it like it is, you have to hear it like it is. �Reinharz, 1988, pp. 15±16) Even with
this level of self knowledge, sensitivity and discipline, there is a significant temptation in such situations to what is sometimes called ventriloquy: the using of the voice of the participant to give expression to the things which the
researcher wants to say or to have said. This is a process which is present in the selection of participants, in the framing of the questions which they are encouraged to answer, in the verbal and visual cues which they are given of the
researcher's pleasure or excitement with their responses, and, later, in the researcher's selection of material for publication. Such ventriloquy, argues Fine, disguises `the usually unacknowledged stances of researchers who navigate
and camouflage theory through the richness of ``native voices''' �Fine, 1994, p.22).
The argument that insiders within `disempowered' communities (or any other communities for that matter) should be
researching and, where appropriate, giving public expression to their own experience is surely uncontroversial . In a
context in which insider research has been negligible and hugely subordinated to waves of outsider research, there is a good case for
taking practical steps to correct that balance and spare a community what can understandably be experienced as an
increasingly oppressive relationship with research.
There are, however, at last three reasons in principle for keeping the possibility of outsider research open :
(i) that such enquiry might enhance the understanding of the researcher; (ii) that it might enhance the
understanding of the community itself; and (iii) that it might enhance the understanding of a wider public.
There is no doubt a place for researching our own experience and that of our own communities, but surely we cannot be condemned
lifelong to such social solipsism? Notwithstanding some postmodernist misgivings, `There is still a world out there,
much to learn, much to discover; and the exploration of ourselves, however laudable in that at least it
risks no new imperialistic gesture, is not, in the end, capable of sustaining lasting interest' (Patai, 1994, p. 67).
The issue is not, however, merely one of satisfying curiosity. There is a real danger that if we become persuaded that we
cannot understand the experience of others and that `we have no right to speak for anyone but ourselves',
then we will all too easily find ourselves epistemologically and morally isolated, furnished with a
comfortable legitimation for ignoring the condition of anyone but ourselves . This is not, any more than the
paternalism of the powerful, the route to a more just society.
How, then can we reconcile the importance of (1) wider social understanding of the world of `disempowered' communities and of the structures
which contribute to that disempowerment, (2) the openness of those communities and structures to the outsider researcher, and (3) the
determination that the researcher should not wittingly or unwittingly reinforce that disempowerment? The literature (from which a few selected
examples are quoted below) provides some clues as to the character of relations between researcher and researched which `emancipatory',
`participatory' or `educative' research might take.
To begin with, we
need to re-examine the application of the notion of `property' to the ownership of
knowledge. In economic terms, knowledge is not a competitive good. It has the distinctive virtue that (at least in terms of its educative
function) it can be infinitely distributed without loss to any of those who are sharing in it. Similarly the
researcher can acquire it from people without denying it to them and can return it enriched. However, it is easy
to neglect the processes of reporting back to people and sharing in knowledge and the importance which can be attached to this process by those
concerned. For Smith, a Maori woman working with research students from the indigenous people of New Zealand, `Reporting back to the people
is never a one-off exercise or a task that can be signed off on completion of the written report'. She describes how one of her students took her
work back to the people she interviewed. `The family was waiting for her; they cooked food and made us welcome. We left knowing that her
work will be passed around the family to be read and eventually will have a place in the living room along with other valued family books and
family photographs' (Smith, 1999, pp. 15±16).
For some, what is required is a moving away from regarding research as a property and towards
seeing it as a dialogic enquiry designed to assist the understanding of all concerned:
Educative research attempts to restructure the traditional relationship between researcher and `subject'. Instead of a one-way process where
Research encourages a dialogic process where participants
negotiate meanings at the level of question posing, data collection and analysis . . . It . . . encourages participants to
work together on an equal basis to reach a mutual understanding. Neither participant should stand apart in an
aloof or judgmental manner; neither should be silenced in the process. (Gitlin and Russell, 1994, p. 185)
researchers extract data from `subjects', Educational
Multi-perspectival approaches are necessary.
Kellner, University of California Los Angeles philosophy professor, and Lewis,
Montclair State University philosophy of education professor, 2007
[Douglas and Tyson, “Liberal Humanism and the European Critical Tradition“
http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/essays/libhumanism.pdf, p.37]
In conclusion we would advocate that critique must, as Hegel suggested, become familiar ¶ with its own
historically conditioned past. Rather than support one theory over the other, ¶ we would also argue that a
‘multiperspectival’ approach to critique is necessary in order ¶ to account for all forms of political,
economic, and social oppression, subjugation, and ¶ exploitation. Thus we must analyze each theory of
critique in terms of its strength and ¶ weaknesses, progressive moments and conservative limitations, and
work towards a more ¶ robust theory of criticism that is capable of cognitively mapping the vast system
of global ¶ capitalism that functions within and conditions a predominantly Eurocentric, patriarchal, ¶
white, heteronormative, male-dominated global economy and networked society.
AT: Not Authentic
Experimenting with different advocacies is not a tactic of whiteness---truly
endorsing a politics of social locations means accepting the fact that political
resistance requires multiple nodes of attack---only a broad-based account can give
us an effective map with which to navigate politics
Braidotti, University of Utrecht women’s studies professor, 2006
[Rosi, “Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics”
http://books.google.com/books?id=Z3KiH4o1sUoC&q=Secondly%2C+the+term+%27transposition%27+
refers+to+mobility+#v=snippet&q=Secondly%2C%20the%20term%20'transposition'%20refers%20to%2
0mobility&f=false, p.7-8]
Secondly, the term 'transposition'
refers to mobility and cross-referencing between disciplines and discursive
levels. I rely on transposable notions that drift nomadically among different texts - including those I authored myself - while producing their
own specific effects. Transposable concepts are 'nomadic notions' that weave a web connecting philosophy to
social realities; theoretical speculations to concrete plans ; concepts to imaginative figurations. Trans-disciplinary in
structure, transposable concepts link bio-technology to ethics and connect them both with social and political philosophy. Moreover, I will
inject feminism, anti-racism, environmental and human rights as an extra booster of theoretical energy and then
let nomadic flows of becoming run loose through them all.¶ Thirdly, the notion of transposition describes the connection
between the text and its social and historical context, in the material and discursive sense of the term. The passion that animates this book is a
concern for my historical situation, in so-called advanced, post-industrial cultures at the start of the third millennium. A kind of amor
fati
motivates me, not as fatalism, but rather in the pragmatic mode of the cartographer . I am seeking
modes of representation and forms of accountability that are adequate to the complexities of the real-life world I am
living in. I want to think about what and where I live - not in a flight away from the embodied and
embedded locations which I happen to inhabit . In Metamorphoses I argued that, if you do not like complexities
you couldn't possibly feel at home in the third millennium. Transpositions enacts this notion by proposing
creative links and zigzagging interconnections between discursive communities which are too often kept
apart from each other. To name but a few significant ones: bio-technologies and ethics and political agency; the
omnipresence of a state of crisis on the one hand and the possibility of sustainable futures on the other; the practice of
nomadic politics of difference versus technological monoculture; the creative potential of hybrid subjectivity, in
opposition to new and more virulent forms of ethnically fixed identities ; cartographic accounts of
locations and normative stances . Ultimately: post-structuralism and ethical norms or values.¶ More specifically, I will transpose
nomadically from philosophical theory to ethical practice. Loyal to the feminist politics of locations, I remain committed
to the task of providing politically informed maps of the present, convinced of the usefulness of a situated approach as a
critical tool to achieve an enlarged sense of objectivity and a more empowering grasp of the social. Politically, a cartographic method
based on the politics of locations results in the recognition that not one single central strategy of
resistance is possible (Grewal and Kaplan 1994; Patton 2000; Massumi 1992b). A heterogeneous style of politics is
needed instead, based on centrelessness. As a corollary, this implies a variety of possible political strategies and the
non-dogmatic acceptance of potentially contradictory positions. A scattered, weblike system is now operational, which
defies and denies any pretence at avant-garde leadership by any group. Resistance being as global as power, it is centreless and just as non-linear:
contemporary politics is rhizomic.
AT: Don’t Speak for Us
The belief that the oppressed can only theorize about their experiences calcifies
privilege---deconstruction of identity is a prerequisite to ending racism
Braidotti, University of Utrecht women’s studies professor, 2006
[Rosi, “Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics” http://www.amazon.com/Transpositions-Nomadic-EthicsRosi-Braidotti/dp/0745635962, p.77-8]
On this point, both bell
hooks and Stuart Hall have in fact warned of the cheap trick that consists in 'saving' the
marginal others from the destabilizing impact of postmodernism in general and poststructuralist philosophies in
particular. In 'Postmodern blackness' bell hooks strongly objects to the way in which blacks and other 'others' are
not entitled to deconstructive approaches to identity. It is as if they should be stuck with the burden of
'authentic' experience , empirical 'reality' and real-life socioeconomic 'conditions', thus leaving the task of theorizing to
others, hooks (1990:23) argues that 'Racism is perpetuated when blackness is associated solely with concrete, gutlevel experience, conceived as either opposing or having no connection to abstract thinking and the production of critical theory'. It is rather
the case that postmodern blackness is infinitely more dangerous to racism, in so far as it exposes the
white arrogance which consists in automatically assimilating the marginal 'others' to 'the view
from below' .¶ The task of bringing into adequate representation the sort of new mixtures that contemporary subjects have become is at the
heart of poststructuralist philosophies and hence of philosophical nomadism. The aim here is to provide a materially based practice of conceptual
representation of the subjects m-becoming within the fast-shifting social landscape of postindustrial societies. The process of drawing
cartographies of the present is central to social theory and cultural studies, in both feminist and mainstream theories. The great advantage of a
poststructuralist approach is that it allows for a radical critique of 'representational' thinking and the kind of
metaphorization processes it implies. Priority is given to the quest for new figurations that account for
processes of changes and transformation, that is to say in-between-ness and flows. The aim is not to
validate or sacralize the authenticity of experience, but rather to develop politically empowering methods
of deconstructing identities, so as to enable a radical shift of perspective within the subject and to lay
the foundations for new interconnections and alliances, bell hooks put it succinctly (hooks 1990: 27): 'Radical
postmodernism calls attention to those shared sensibilities which cross the boundaries of class, gender,
race, etc. that could be fertile ground for the construction of empathy - ties that would promote
recognition of common commitments, and serve as a base for solidarity and coalition.'
AT: Not Situated = Incorrect
Social location doesn’t disprove our knowledge – even if it is socially produced –
that doesn’t make it wrong.
Bhambra, University of Warwick sociology professor, and Margree, University of
Brighton cultural studies professor, 2010
[Gurminder and Victoria, “Identity Politics and the Need for a ‘Tomorrow’”
http://www.academia.edu/471824/Identity_Politics_and_the_Need_for_a_Tomorrow_, p.61]
We suggest that alternative models of identity and community are required from those put forward by
essentialist theories, and that these are offered by the work of two theorists, Satya Mohanty and Lynn
Hankinson Nelson. Mohanty’s ([1993] 2000)post-positivist, realist theorisation of identity suggests a way
through the impasses of essentialism, while avoiding the excesses of the postmodernism that Bramen,
among others, derides as a proposed alternative to identity politics. For Mohanty ([1993]2000), identities
must be understood as theoretical constructions that enable subjects to read the world in particular ways;
as such, substantial claims about identity are, in fact, implicit explana-tions of the social world and its
constitutive relations of power. Experience – that from which identity is usually thought to derive– is not
something that simply occurs, or announces its meaning and significance in a self-evident fashion: rather,
experience is always a work of interpretation that is collectively produced (Scott 1991). ¶ Mohanty’s work
resonates with that of Nelson (1993), who similarly insists upon the communal nature of meaning or
knowledge-making. Rejecting both foundationalist views of knowledge and the postmodern alternative
which announces the “death of the subject” and the impossibility of epistemology, Nelson argues instead
that, it is not individuals who are the agents of epistemology, but communities. Since it is not possible for
an individual to know something that another individual could not also (possibly) know, it must be that
the ability to make sense of the world proceeds from shared conceptual frameworks and practices. Thus, it
is the community that is the generator and repository of knowledge. Bringing Mohanty’s work on identity
as theoretical construction together with Nelson’s work on episte-mological communities therefore
suggests that, “identity” is one of the knowledges that is produced and enabled for and by individu-als in
the context of the communities within which they exist.
AT: Perm Coopts Our Experience
No cooption – the perm is about methods, not taking experiences.
Bhambra, University of Warwick sociology professor, and Margree, University of
Brighton cultural studies professor, 2010
[Gurminder and Victoria, “Identity Politics and the Need for a ‘Tomorrow’”
http://www.academia.edu/471824/Identity_Politics_and_the_Need_for_a_Tomorrow_, p.62]
The post-positivist reformulation of “experience” is necessary here as it privileges understandings that
emerge through the processing of experience in the context of negotiated premises about the world, over
experience itself producing self-evident knowledge (self-evident, however, only to the one who has “had”
the experience). This distinction is crucial for, if it is not the expe-rience of, for example, sexual
discrimination that “makes” one a feminist, but rather, the paradigm through which one attempts to
understand acts of sexual discrimination, then it is not necessary to have actually had the experience
oneself in order to make the identification “feminist”. If being a “feminist” is not a given fact of a particular social
(and/or biological) location – that is, being designated “female” – but is, in Mohanty’s terms, an “achieve-ment” – that is, something
worked towards through a process of analysis and interpretation – then two implications follow. First, that not all women are
feminists. Second, that feminism is some-thing that is “achievable” by men. 3 ¶ While it is accepted that experiences
are not merely theoretical or conceptual constructs which can be transferred from one person to another with transparency, we think that there
is some-thing politically self-defeating about insisting that one can only understand an experience (or then
comment upon it) if one has actually had the experience oneself. As Rege (1998) argues, to privilege knowledge
claims on the basis of direct experience, or then on claims of authenticity, can lead to a narrow identity
poli-tics that limits the emancipatory potential of the movements or organisations making such claims.
Further, if it is not possible to understand an experience one has not had, then what point is there in listening to each other?
Following Said, such a view seems to authorise privileged groups to ignore the discourses of disadvantaged
ones, or, we would add, to place exclusive responsibility for addressing injustice with the oppressed
themselves. Indeed, as Rege suggests, reluctance to speak about the experi-ence of others has led to an
assumption on the part of some white feminists that “confronting racism is the sole responsibility of black
feminists”, just as today “issues of caste become the sole responsibility of the dalit women’s organisations” (Rege 1998). Her argument
for a dalit feminist standpoint, then, is not made in terms solely of the experiences of dalit women, but rather a call for others to
“educate themselves about the histories, the preferred social relations and utopias and the struggles of the
marginalised” (Rege 1998). This, she argues, allows “their cause” to become “our cause”, not as a form of
appropriation of “their” struggle, but through the transformation of subjectivities that enables a
recognition that “their” struggle is also “our” struggle. Following Rege, we suggest that social processes can
facilitate the understanding of experiences, thus making those experi-ences the possible object of analysis
and action for all, while recognising that they are not equally available or powerful for all subjects. 4 ¶
Understandings of identity as given and essential, then, we suggest, need to give way to understandings
which accept them as socially constructed and contingent on the work of particular, overlapping,
epistemological communities that agree that this or that is a viable and recognised identity. Such an
understanding avoids what Bramen identifies as the postmodern excesses of “post-racial” theory, where in this “world without
borders (“rac-ism is real, but race is not”) one can be anything one wants to be: a black kid in Harlem can be Croatian-American, if that is what
he chooses, and a white kid from Iowa can be Korean-American”(2002: 6). Unconstrained choice is not possible to the extent that, as Nelson
(1993) argues, the concept of the epistemological com-munity requires any individual knowledge claim to sustain itself in relation to standards of
evaluation that already exist and that are social. Any claim to identity, then, would have to be recog-nised by particular communities as valid in
order to be success-ful. This further shifts the discussion beyond the limitations of essentialist accounts of identity by recognising that the
commu-nities that confer identity
are constituted through their shared epistemological frameworks and not
necessarily by shared characteristics of their members conceived of as irreducible. 5 Hence, the
epistemological community that enables us to identify our-selves as feminists is one that is built up out of
a broadly agreed upon paradigm for interpreting the world and the relations between the sexes: it is not
one that is premised upon possessing the physical attribute of being a woman or upon sharing the same experiences. Since
at least the 1970s, a key aspect of black and/or postcolonial feminism has been to identify the problems associated with such assumptions (see,
is the identification of injustice which calls forth action and thus
allows for the construction of healthy solidarities. 6 While it is accepted that there may be important
differences between those who recognise the injustice of disadvantage while being, in some respects, its
beneficiary (for example, men, white people, brahmins), and those who recognise the injustice from the position of being at its effect
(women, ethnic minorities,dalits), we would privilege the importance of a shared political commitment to equality
as the basis for negotiating such differences. Our argument here is that thinking through identity claims from the
basis of understanding them as epistemological communities militates against exclusionary politics (and its
asso-ciated problems) since the emphasis comes to be on participation in a shared epistemological and political
project as opposed to notions of fixed characteristics – the focus is on the activities indi- viduals participate in rather than the
for discussion, Rege 1998, 2000). ¶ We believe that it
characteristics they are deemed to possess. Identity is thus defined further as a function of activity located in particular social locations
(understood as the complex of objective forces that influence the conditions in which one lives) rather than of nature or origin (Mohanty
1995:109-10). As such, the communities that enable identity should not be conceived of as “imagined” since they are produced by very real
actions, practices and projects.