Summary

• Objects (1 modified, 1 added, 0 removed)
  • Caselist.RoundClass[16]
  • Caselist.CitesClass[32]

Details

Caselist.RoundClass[16]

EntryDate

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1		-2017-01-30 20:18:22.777
	1	+2017-01-30 20:18:22.0

Caselist.CitesClass[32]

Cites

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	1	+I endorse the entirety of the 1AC without their use of apocalyptic rhetoric.
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	3	+Apocalyptic rhetoric fuels psychic numbing which makes it impossible for us to discern threats which are truly real
	4	+Chernus 14
	5	+Ira Chernus, a TomDispatch regular, is professor of religious studies at the University of Colorado Boulder and author of the online "MythicAmerica: Essays." He blogs at MythicAmerica.us; “Apocalypses Everywhere Is There Any Hope in an Era Filled with Gloom and Doom?”; February 25, 2014; http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175811/tomgram3A_ira_chernus2C_what_ever_happened_to_plain_old_apocalypse/
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	7	+Yes, the A-word is now everywhere, and most of the time it no longer means "the end of everything," but "the end of anything." Living a life so saturated with apocalypses undoubtedly takes a toll, though it’s a subject we seldom talk about. So let's lift the lid off the A-word, take a peek inside, and examine how it affects our everyday lives. Since it’s not exactly a pretty sight, it’s easy enough to forget that the idea of the apocalypse has been a container for hope as well as fear. Maybe even now we’ll find some hope inside if we look hard enough. A Brief History of Apocalypse Apocalyptic stories have been around at least since biblical times, if not earlier. They show up in many religions, always with the same basic plot: the end is at hand; the cosmic struggle between good and evil (or God and the Devil, as the New Testament has it) is about to culminate in catastrophic chaos, mass extermination, and the end of the world as we know it. That, however, is only Act I, wherein we wipe out the past and leave a blank cosmic slate in preparation for Act II: a new, infinitely better, perhaps even perfect world that will arise from the ashes of our present one. It’s often forgotten that religious apocalypses, for all their scenes of destruction, are ultimately stories of hope; and indeed, they have brought it to millions who had to believe in a better world a-comin', because they could see nothing hopeful in this world of pain and sorrow. That traditional religious kind of apocalypse has also been part and parcel of American political life since, in Common Sense, Tom Paine urged the colonies to revolt by promising, "We have it in our power to begin the world over again." When World War II ~-~- itself now sometimes called an apocalypse ~-~- ushered in the nuclear age, it brought a radical transformation to the idea. Just as novelist Kurt Vonnegut lamented that the threat of nuclear war had robbed us of "plain old death" (each of us dying individually, mourned by those who survived us), the theologically educated lamented the fate of religion's plain old apocalypse. After this country’s "victory weapon" obliterated two Japanese cities in August 1945, most Americans sighed with relief that World War II was finally over. Few, however, believed that a permanently better world would arise from the radioactive ashes of that war. In the 1950s, even as the good times rolled economically, America's nuclear fear created something historically new and ominous ~-~- a thoroughly secular image of the apocalypse. That's the one you'll get first if you type "define apocalypse" into Google's search engine: "the complete final destruction of the world." In other words, one big "whoosh" and then... nothing. Total annihilation. The End. Apocalypse as utter extinction was a new idea. Surprisingly soon, though, most Americans were (to adapt the famous phrase of filmmaker Stanley Kubrick) learning how to stop worrying and get used to the threat of "the big whoosh." With the end of the Cold War, concern over a world-ending global nuclear exchange essentially evaporated, even if the nuclear arsenals of that era were left ominously in place. Meanwhile, another kind of apocalypse was gradually arising: environmental destruction so complete that it, too, would spell the end of all life. This would prove to be brand new in a different way. It is, as Todd Gitlin has so aptly termed it, history’s first "slow-motion apocalypse." Climate change, as it came to be called, had been creeping up on us "in fits and starts," largely unnoticed, for two centuries. Since it was so different from what Gitlin calls "suddenly surging Genesis-style flood" or the familiar "attack out of the blue," it presented a baffling challenge. After all, the word apocalypse had been around for a couple of thousand years or more without ever being associated in any meaningful way with the word gradual. The eminent historian of religions Mircea Eliade once speculated that people could grasp nuclear apocalypse because it resembled Act I in humanity’s huge stock of apocalypse myths, where the end comes in a blinding instant ~-~- even if Act II wasn’t going to follow. This mythic heritage, he suggested, remains lodged in everyone's unconscious, and so feels familiar. But in a half-century of studying the world's myths, past and present, he had never found a single one that depicted the end of the world coming slowly. This means we have no unconscious imaginings to pair it with, nor any cultural tropes or traditions that would help us in our struggle to grasp it. That makes it so much harder for most of us even to imagine an environmentally caused end to life. The very category of "apocalypse" doesn't seem to apply. Without those apocalyptic images and fears to motivate us, a sense of the urgent action needed to avert such a slowly emerging global catastrophe lessens. All of that (plus of course the power of the interests arrayed against regulating the fossil fuel industry) might be reason enough to explain the widespread passivity that puts the environmental peril so far down on the American political agenda. But as Dr. Seuss would have said, that is not all! Oh no, that is not all. Apocalypses Everywhere When you do that Google search on apocalypse, you'll also get the most fashionable current meaning of the word: "Any event involving destruction on an awesome scale; for example 'a stock market apocalypse.'" Welcome to the age of apocalypses everywhere. With so many constantly crying apocalyptic wolf or selling apocalyptic thrills, it's much harder now to distinguish between genuine threats of extinction and the cheap imitations. The urgency, indeed the very meaning, of apocalypse continues to be watered down in such a way that the word stands in danger of becoming virtually meaningless. As a result, we find ourselves living in an era that constantly reflects premonitions of doom, yet teaches us to look away from the genuine threats of world-ending catastrophe. Oh, America still worries about the Bomb ~-~- but only when it's in the hands of some "bad" nation. Once that meant Iraq (even if that country, under Saddam Hussein, never had a bomb and in 2003, when the Bush administration invaded, didn’t even have a bomb program). Now, it means Iran ~-~- another country without a bomb or any known plan to build one, but with the apocalyptic stare focused on it as if it already had an arsenal of such weapons ~-~- and North Korea. These days, in fact, it's easy enough to pin the label "apocalyptic peril" on just about any country one loathes, even while ignoring friends, allies, and oneself. We're used to new apocalyptic threats emerging at a moment's notice, with little (or no) scrutiny of whether the A-word really applies. What's more, the Cold War era fixed a simple equation in American public discourse: bad nation + nuclear weapon = our total destruction. So it's easy to buy the platitude that Iran must never get a nuclear weapon or it's curtains. That leaves little pressure on top policymakers and pundits to explain exactly how a few nuclear weapons held by Iran could actually harm Americans. Meanwhile, there's little attention paid to the world's largest nuclear arsenal, right here in the U.S. Indeed, America's nukes are quite literally impossible to see, hidden as they are underground, under the seas, and under the wraps of "top secret" restrictions. Who’s going to worry about what can’t be seen when so many dangers termed "apocalyptic" seem to be in plain sight? Environmental perils are among them: melting glaciers and open-water Arctic seas, smog-blinded Chinese cities, increasingly powerful storms, and prolonged droughts. Yet most of the time such perils seem far away and like someone else's troubles. Even when dangers in nature come close, they generally don't fit the images in our apocalyptic imagination. Not surprisingly, then, voices proclaiming the inconvenient truth of a slowly emerging apocalypse get lost in the cacophony of apocalypses everywhere. Just one more set of boys crying wolf and so remarkably easy to deny or stir up doubt about. Death in Life Why does American culture use the A-word so promiscuously? Perhaps we've been living so long under a cloud of doom that every danger now readily takes on the same lethal hue. Psychiatrist Robert Lifton predicted such a state years ago when he suggested that the nuclear age had put us all in the grips of what he called "psychic numbing" or "death in life." We can no longer assume that we'll die Vonnegut’s plain old death and be remembered as part of an endless chain of life. Lifton's research showed that the link between death and life had become, as he put it, a "broken connection." As a result, he speculated, our minds stop trying to find the vitalizing images necessary for any healthy life. Every effort to form new mental images only conjures up more fear that the chain of life itself is coming to a dead end. Ultimately, we are left with nothing but "apathy, withdrawal, depression, despair." If that's the deepest psychic lens through which we see the world, however unconsciously, it's easy to understand why anything and everything can look like more evidence that The End is at hand. No wonder we have a generation of American youth and young adults who take a world filled with apocalyptic images for granted. Think of it as, in some grim way, a testament to human resiliency. They are learning how to live with the only reality they've ever known (and with all the irony we’re capable of, others are learning how to sell them cultural products based on that reality). Naturally, they assume it's the only reality possible. It's no surprise that "The Walking Dead," a zombie apocalypse series, is their favorite TV show, since it reveals (and revels in?) what one TV critic called the "secret life of the post-apocalyptic American teenager." Perhaps the only thing that should genuinely surprise us is how many of those young people still manage to break through psychic numbing in search of some way to make a difference in the world. Yet even in the political process for change, apocalypses are everywhere. Regardless of the issue, the message is typically some version of "Stop this catastrophe now or we're doomed!" (An example: Stop the Keystone XL pipeline or it’s “game over”!) A better future is often implied between the lines, but seldom gets much attention because it’s ever harder to imagine such a future, no less believe in it. No matter how righteous the cause, however, such a single-minded focus on danger and doom subtly reinforces the message of our era of apocalypses everywhere: abandon all hope, ye who live here and now.
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	9	+Apocalyptic representations of climate change, particularly in the Small evidence, portray ecological destruction as a distant future event—that masks the suffering of the present and rationalizes ridiculous techno-fixes which will further destroy the Earth
	10	+Crist 7
	11	+Eileen Crist, Associate Professor of Science and Technology Studies in the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies at Virginia Tech “Beyond the Climate Crisis: A Critique of Climate Change Discourse” Telos 141 Winter 2007
	12	+
	13	+Climate Change as Apocalypse and the Rise of Geoengineering Proposals The knowledge that biodiversity is in deep trouble has been available for at least three decades, but this momentous event has never inspired the urgency that climate change has triggered in a handful of years. This seems to be a blatant manifestation of anthropocentrism (the idée fixe that human interests, including short-term and non-vital ones, always come before all others), for climate change is perceived as threatening people directly— as the summer 2003 European heat wave, Hurricane Katrina, and other extreme weather exemplifies. The loss of life’s diversity and abundance, on the other hand, is not widely regarded as harboring a survival risk for human beings. After all, countless species, subspecies, ecosystems, populations of wild animals and plants, ancient forests, wetlands, and so on, have been eclipsed or diminished, and yet, to cite an anti-environmentalist cliché, “the sky did not fall.” But the dominant framing of climate change—its identification as the most urgent problem that we face—all but bluntly declares that the sky is falling. The apocalyptic potential of global warming in the not-so-distant future manifests between the lines of climate-change writings far more vividly than mere subtext. The difference between such climate-change characterizations (quoted earlier) as “collapse of civilization” or “planetary emergency,” on the one hand, and the idea of apocalypse, on the other, is almost purely semantic. Climate-change works do not employ the word apocalypse, but they often imply or outright describe something that uncannily resembles what religious imagery has pictured. Ross Gelbspan, for example, in a description fairly typical of what climate change foreshadows, writes of “the world becoming a storm-battered, insect-infested breeding ground of infectious diseases,” one “of temperature extremes, of extensive drought and desperate heat.”48 The Revenge of Gaia may be the most openly apocalyptic work on global warming in print. Lovelock assesses all variables affecting climate as being in positive feedback, which indicates, in his words, that “any addition of heat from any source will be amplified.”49 Among positive feedbacks, he lists loss of albedo from the melting of polar ice, decline of carbon-dioxide-absorbing and cloud-producing plankton, and the release of land-locked and (possibly) sea-bottom methane—all consequences of increasing temperatures, which, in turn, will act to reinforce and accelerate “global heating.” Any one of these feedbacks might raise concern, but considered together an alarming picture emerges for Lovelock. He predicts runaway heating: “The evidence coming in from the watchers of the world,” he claims, “brings news of an imminent shift in our climate towards one that can easily be described as Hell: so hot, so deadly that only a handful of the teeming billions now alive will survive.”50 This forecast proceeds from the apprehension of overstepping Earth-system thresholds and unleashing consequences both deadly and uncontrollable: in the climate-change literature, exceeding such thresholds is referred to as “dangerous anthropogenic interference.” While the specific forecast of a Hell in which billions perish is at the extreme end of climate-change predictions, the general intimation of a looming calamity for large numbers of people, and for civilization itself, is widespread in the literature. Overt or oblique, apocalyptic intimations abound in climate-change discourse. The concept of apocalypse is not just a household idea, but it is so in the air today (with fundamentalisms of all stripes and their ideas in full swing) that explicit reference to an impending apocalypse is redundant for the audience of climate-change writings. Dire warnings about the consequences of the continued use of fossil fuels, coupled with images of rising seas, soaring heat waves, raging wildfires, rampant disease, and acidified oceans, suffice to vividly evoke an end-ofthe-world vision circulated for two millennia by Judeo-Christian culture. Apocalyptic thinking manifests in a three-fold narrative structure pertaining to the timing, nature, and consequences of expected events if greenhouse-gas emissions continue unabated: one, an Earth-shattering calamity is forecast (or insinuated) to arrive at a future, albeit unspecified, time; two, it is nebulously portrayed as a single monumental catastrophe (adumbrated, perhaps, by a string of interconnected lesser catastrophes) that will affect everyone and everything; and three, it is suggested that human survival and the viability of civilization are at stake, with unprecedented levels of death, suffering, and social breakdown anticipated. Whether or not apocalyptic admonitions are tracking an immanent reality, and the world is actually headed for the hellish heat and anomie that Lovelock fears, climate change as apocalypse can be censured for playing straight into the hands of the religious fundamentalisms that are menacing the world. Indeed, the apocalyptic narratives of climate-change literature align closely with prophetic claims strewn throughout the Old and New Testaments.51 A perverse and noteworthy consequence of the alignment between climate-change and biblical imagery is that many fundamentalists (politicians, decision-makers, or citizens) may well remain undeterred and unmoved by climate-change warnings, which only resonate with their visions of death-by-fire, on the one hand, and rapture, on the other. As Derrick Jensen observes about this disturbing element at play today, “to many fundamentalists, the killing of the planet is not something to be avoided but encouraged, hastening as it does the victory of God over all things earthly.”52 Apocalyptic warnings dovetail into the day-of-reckoning fantasies of those who seem to care little about the biosphere’s destiny; and while their fantasies may not be widely held beliefs, they possess a sort of de facto credibility by virtue of their sheer cultural ubiquity.53 Narrative affinity with biblical stories is the least problematic aspect of representing the climate crisis as near-future apocalypse. The most pernicious dimension of this representation is that of occluding the reality we are (and have been) immersed in here and now—namely, the simplification-cum-homogenization of life on Earth. Climate change is not causing, but is hastening, the running down of the planet, and the technological grail that might ultimately solve the climate crisis will, more likely than not, simply allow the business-as-usual unraveling of the biosphere to proceed. Besides coddling humanity’s proclivity for self-centered concern, apocalyptic thinking directs attention toward some future Hollywood-style cataclysm, while dimming awareness of the present and real suffering of nonhumans, disempowered and impoverished people, and consumers beleaguered by clutter and malaise. Life’s ongoing devastation, and humanity’s pathological imbalance with wild nature and schisms within itself, are the predicaments that we are called to face—not the preemption of some imagined crash in some imagined future. Given the dominant framing of climate change, it is hardly surprising that schemes for what is called “geoengineering” (and, in even more Orwellian speak, “radiation management”) are increasingly aired as reasonable solutions to the climate crisis; it will be equally unsurprising if they are soon promoted as inevitable. A recent article in Nature claims that given “the need for drastic approaches to stave off the effects of rising planetary temperatures. . . curiosity about geoengineering looks likely to grow.”54 Six months earlier, an article in Wired gushed over the prospects, assuring us that “luckily, a growing number of scientists are thinking more aggressively, developing incredibly ambitious technical fixes to cool the planet.”55 In the wake of apocalyptic fears, geoengineering is easily packaged as an idea whose time has come; physicist Paul Crutzen’s recent attentions have imbued it with even more credibility. Crutzen received the Nobel Prize for his work on ozone depletion, and is now cautiously promoting “active scientific research” into the possibility of shooting SO2 into the stratosphere, which, by converting into sulfate particles, would mask global warming by an effect known as global dimming; Crutzen calls it “stratospheric albedo enhancement.”56 In essence, this strategy calls for countering one form of pollution with another.
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	15	+Speculative extinction risks rationalize oppressive state institutions—that leads to a net increase in existential risk—challenging their epistemic frame is a prior question—Bostrom ironically goes neg on this question
	16	+Bostrom 13
	17	+Nick Bostrom (faculty of philosophy, University of Oxford). “Existential Risk Prevention as Global Priority.” Global Policy, Vol. 4, Issue 1. 2013. http://www.existential-risk.org/concept.pdf
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	19	+Moral motivations, too, may fail to measure up to the magnitude of what is at stake. The scope insensitivity of our moral sentiments is likely to be especially pronounced when very large numbers are involved: Substantially larger numbers, such as 500 million deaths, and especially qualitatively different scenarios such as the extinction of the entire human species, seem to trigger a different mode of thinking—enter into a ‘separate magisterium’. People who would never dream of hurting a child hear of an existential risk, and say, ‘Well, maybe the human species doesn’t really deserve to survive’. (Yudkowsky, 2008, p. 114) Existential risk requires a proactive approach. The reactive approach—to observe what happens, limit damages, and then implement improved mechanisms to reduce the probability of a repeat occurrence—does not work when there is no opportunity to learn from failure. Instead, we must anticipate emerging dangers, mobilise support for action against hypothetical future harm, and get our precautions sufficiently right the first time. That is a tall order. Few institutions are capable of operating consistently at such a level of effective rationality, and attempts to imitate such proactive behaviour within less perfect institutions can easily backfire. Speculative riskmongering could be exploited to rationalise self-serving aggressive action, expansion of costly and potentially oppressive security bureaucracies, or restrictions of civil liberties that keep societies free and sane. The result of false approximations to the rational ideal could easily be a net increase in existential risk.32 Multidisciplinary and epistemological challenges, academic distractions and diversions, cognitive biases, freerider problems, moral lethargy and scope-insensitivity, institutional incompetence, and the political exploitation of unquantifiable threats are thus some of the barriers to effective mitigation. To these we can add the difficulty of achieving required levels of global cooperation. While some existential risks can be tackled unilaterally—any state with a space industry could build a global defense against asteroid impacts—other risks require a joint venture between many states. Management of the global climate may require buy-in by an overwhelming majority of industrialised and industrialising nations. Avoidance of arms races and relinquishment of dangerous directions of technological research may require that all States join the effort, since a single defector could annul any bene- fits of collaboration. Some future dangers might even require that each State monitor and regulate every significant group or individual within its territory.33

EntryDate

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	1	+2017-01-30 20:18:24.665

Judge

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	1	+Akash Gogate

Opponent

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	1	+Harvard Westlake CE

ParentRound

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	1	+16

Round

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	1	+5

Team

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	1	+Lexington Weiler Neg

Title

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	1	+1- PIC- Apocalyptic Rhetoric

Tournament

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	1	+Emory