Tournament: ToC | Round: 1 | Opponent: Any | Judge: Any
Because the extraction of diamonds in Africa has funded and caused brutal civil wars, created immense poverty, and justified the oppression of indigenous people, I affirm.  While the horrific stories of blood diamonds are often seen on the news, the 1AC offers the narrative of Taline Khansa, who witnessed the horrors of mining first hand while working for a nonprofit organization in Sierra Leone.  Khansa describes her experience,

During my second week in Sierra Leone as a Kiva Fellow, I visited Kono district where this company - among others - bases its operations, and if this trip has taught me anything, it is that there is little evidence that diamond mining has brought any positive changes to the local community, or even has the best intentions of doing so in the future. Kono (also refered to as Koidu) is located in the eastern part of Sierra Leone, and it is the diamond center of the country. A person might assume that such an area may be more developed than other towns, but reality is an ironic opposite of that…. starting with the 4 hour drive to get to Kono. Have the multinational companies invested in basic infrastructure such as paved roads? The answer is no. Our 4x4 jeep lost a portion of its exhaust pipe and the front bottom engine cover on the drive there. Come rainy season, this road turns muddy which cuts off its community from supplies. There is no alternate better route. Much of Kono's infrastructure is underdeveloped, more so than other parts of the country. The town lacks an electricity grid, with everything running on individual generators. Because of its location and the difficulty in getting there, it is quite normal for Kono to have fuel shortages. Even SMT (one of Kiva's partners in Sierra Leone) has to strategically use its available fuel at the Koidu branch to turn the power on to update its database, and then turn it back off. While sanitation and garbage disposal infrastructure is also in dire need of investment in most of the country, Kono has the additional disadvantage of compounding that with environmental damage from mining. At the SMT office, it is quite common for the building to shake once a diamond blast goes off. Entire communities are being resettled into different areas so the land where their houses once stood can be are blown up for diamonds. One look at Kono will remind you of a stereotypical deserted gold rush city. What will be left of this town once the diamonds run out? While companies are required to file environmental assessment reports, there is no solid vision of how this land will be rehabilitated once its been all torn up and the companies move their operations elsewhere. The Economist also quotes two mining companies as saying, "Sierra Leone is getting a good deal and that without special treatment they might not have invested in the country." A good deal? Special Treatment? These are synonymous to tax evasion, illegal exporting, poor wages, and unacceptable working conditions. Even the government is not seeing the revenue it should be from these companies in order to invest in the much needed development in Kono and the rest of the country. The Sierra Leone Telegraph summarizes the issues: "Poor governance, corruption and the lack of human capacity to monitor and evaluate the operations and performance of foreign companies operating in the country, are making it easier for companies to succeed in avoiding or evading their obligations to the people of Sierra Leone." According to the DanWatch Report Not Sharing the Loot, "Government revenue from mining accounted for only 1.1 of GDP for 2010" and “Government revenue from the mining industry in Sierra Leone is limited, compared to the importance of the industry to the country.” The report makes the following recommendation: "The government of Sierra Leone and the mining companies should take action to uncover and unleash the lost potential for development from the mining sector. But also international regulation is needed to strengthen transparency into the corporate structure and accounts of multinational mining companies."  With more diamond, iron ore, gold, magnetite, bauxite, and rutile mining expected to start soon, it is imperative for a nation that ranks 180 out of 187 on the human development index not to have its land pillaged for riches. While a new government agency has been set-up to review the existing mining contracts and recommend changes, locals have little faith in this entity so far. From my three weeks here, it is quite obvious that Sierra Leone does not lack hardworking people or natural resources. With aid money beginning to decrease as Sierra Leone's politics stabilizes further, it is imperative to ensure this country's future through developing industries that protect the land, create sustainability sustainable industries, respect the peoples' culture and history, and invest in the youth. The Kimberley Certification of a diamond arguably guarantees that it is not a blood diamond; the certification has come under scrutiny and has prompted human rights group Global Witness to quit the process citing its failure to prevent conflict diamonds from reaching consumers. Additionally, the certification carries no significance regarding working conditions in the mines, assessment of the environmental impact, improvements to poverty levels, or guarantees against child labor. While my personal choice to purchase diamonds has been permanently altered after a visit to Kono, I am not criticizing people who buy diamonds continue to do so. Yet, ignorance is not bliss, and insight into the realities of the mining industry is needed for local agencies and multinational corporations to be held liable by their own citizens and citizens worldwide. Taline Khansa 13 wonprofit peace education organization called Childrens International Summer Villages, study Aerospace Engineering and spent six years working in the industry. While she gained professional experience in manufacturing and engineering, she continued to follow global affairs "The Curse of Diamond Mining in Sierra Leone" May 2, 2013

Diamonds produced by the mining industries of Africa earned their name “blood diamonds” for good and obvious reasons.  To pretend that the extraction of diamonds is anything but destructive ignores the dehumanizing realities a diamond miner must face on any given day. This is demonstrated through the story of Sahr Amara, a miner in the country of Sierra Leone.  Vivienne Walt tells us Sahr’s story,

Sahr Amara is stooped low, knee-deep in a muddy river, in the fifth hour of his workday. As he has each day for a the past week Sahr, the 18-year-old will earn a stipend of only 7 cents, enough to buy himself a bowl of porridge to see him through the day. Yet he returns every morning to dig in the wilting heat on the edge of Koidu, a town in eastern Sierra Leone, hunting for the one thing he says could transform his life: a diamond. Since he is the oldest of six children - three others have died of diseases - much of his family's future rests on his prospects. "If I find a big diamond, I can afford to go to school, I can learn, and then I can help my family and even my village," he says. So far the plan has proved elusive; he has found no gems during his first week of work. "It's not easy," he says. "I think it depends on God." Whether or not divine intervention leads Amara to a big find, his tale is anchored in a much more earthly economy: the $60-billion-a-year diamond industry, which has built its growth on dreams of love rather than of raw survival. Koidu, whose diamonds have been mined since the 1930s, is thousands of miles away - and a galaxy removed - from the glittering displays in jewelry stores in New York, Tokyo and London. It is set in a country where the average man earns $220 a year and dies at 39. In the dwellings along Koidu's dirt tracks, residents eat dinner by candlelight not because it is romantic but because there is no electricity in town, just as there are no telephone lines and little indoor plumbing. In short, it is hard to imagine a starker contrast between Amara's world and that of the people who might one day wear whatever diamond he finds, and they live in deep ignorance of each other. When asked what diamonds are used for, Amara draws a blank. "I only know they are valuable," he says. But after 130 years of diamond mining in Africa, that ignorance is unraveling fast as the two worlds collide over the image of diamonds. The conflict, which has rocked the industry in recent years, may reach fever pitch this month with the release of the movie "Blood Diamond." Set in wartime Sierra Leone during the late 1990s, the film depicts a South African diamond smuggler, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, trying to recover a rare pink stone from a local fisherman whom rebels have forced to dig in the diamond pits. The story line - a mixture of villainy and heroism - is classic Hollywood. But its roots are fact: In the 1990s rebels in Sierra Leone and Liberia financed their carnage from diamonds plucked out of the rivers and traded for arms. During a decade of war about 50,000 people were killed, and thousands had their hands hacked off by rebels. Months before it opened, the movie had garnered media attention, aided by a marketing blitz by Warner Bros. (owned by Time Warner (Charts), parent of Fortune's publisher) and a $15 million counterattack by the World Diamond Council, an organization founded by more than 50 producers and dealers to end illegal diamond trading. "We have been engaged in a massive educational campaign," says Eli Izakhoff, chairman and CEO of the council, which is heavily financed by De Beers, the company that sources about 40 percent of the world's diamonds, all of them from Africa. "This movie gives the industry a great story to tell." The council's message: More than 99 percent of diamonds are now from conflict-free sources, and millions of Africans have schooling and health care thanks to diamond revenues. The movie is indeed a period piece: The civil wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia ended a few years ago. But the war over perceptions is just warming up. Many in the industry fear that as the end credits roll, moviegoers might glance down at their diamond rings and wonder under what circumstances the gems were dug. Unlike oil prospecting or coal mining - essentials for modern life - those questions could roil an industry whose lifeblood is ephemeral. "Diamonds are essentially worth nothing," says Mordechai Rapaport, whose Rapaport Group price list is the industry standard. It's all about what they signify, he explains: In the case of a wedding ring, it's the guy, not the one-carat diamond. By that logic, he adds, "when a guy gives a woman a diamond and someone was killed for it, it is not worth anything.” Diamond producers and dealers did not need Hollywood to reach that conclusion. As war raged in the past decade, they realized that so-called blood diamonds carried a risk to their business that was far out of proportion to the tiny number of stones. Even during the bloodiest years no more than 15 percent of the world's diamonds were controlled by rebels in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The vast majority of diamonds, then and now, come from deep-level mines run by well-ordered international corporations, including Koidu Holdings, Sierra Leone's newest such operation, which opened in 2003 and exports $2.5 million in diamonds a month. And although UN investigators recently found that rebels in the Ivory Coast had smuggled millions of dollars' worth of diamonds onto the world market through Ghana, blood diamonds account for only 0.2 percent of today's global supply. But the industry's problem is far trickier than percentages. Consumers cannot be sure which diamonds are blood diamonds. And therein lies the potential for a boycott, especially since synthetic diamonds now look close to the real thing. "Diamonds are a luxury, so we depend completely on the consumer's faith," says Rory More O'Ferrall, director of external affairs for De Beers. "Anything that affects the integrity of that we need to address." Tackling the problem took an unlikely alliance: Industry executives joined forces in 2003 with governments and the UN to end the trade of conflict diamonds. The resulting Kimberley Process Certification Scheme is a rare experiment by a major industry to monitor its own abuses. The 71 member countries agree to trade only among themselves. They inspect one another's facilities, then issue certificates declaring their diamonds conflict-free. In theory, rigorous paperwork tries to trace all diamonds from mines to consumers. Transgressors are ousted: The Republic of Congo was banned in 2004, and Venezuela was threatened with suspension last month after reporting zero diamond exports for 2005. But the system is hardly flawless, even in the U.S. In September the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that Customs and Treasury officials were only haphazardly enforcing the system, leaving companies to monitor themselves. Last year about 300,000 more carats were exported from than imported to the U.S. - which produces no commercial diamonds itself. Representatives from all 71 countries met last month in Botswana to try to tighten loopholes and squeeze out nonmembers. "There are fewer and fewer countries left that nonmembers can trade with," says Sue Saarnio, the U.S. State Department's representative to the November conference.  A far grimmer assessment of the Kimberley Process can be found in the back alleys of Koidu. As the clammy heat eases off in the late afternoon, dozens of men converge on the neighborhood dubbed by the locals "Open Yei," Creole for "keep your eyes open," a reference to its thriving unlicensed diamond trading. The action is the area's major entertainment, drawing a crowd of curious men and children. In a dirt clearing between the small wooden storefronts, Abdollai Koroma runs his business from a chair under a shade tree, clutching a yellow calculator and a jeweler's loupe in a weathered pouch. During just one hour eight men arrive with their wares wrapped in scraps of paper stuffed in their pockets. Koroma takes each stone and swirls it in his mouth before examining it briefly under the loupe. "This is 1.20 carats," he says after spitting out a glittering stone the size of a shirt button. Koroma, who started trading diamonds at age 17, taps on his calculator, peels off a wad of banknotes, and makes his biggest purchase of the day: 200,000 leones, about $66. The previous day the neighborhood trade was equally brisk, as men gathered to sell diamonds to Komba Fillefaboa, a 47-year-old trader who began digging when he was 12. Fillefaboa says he buys dozens of stones on an average afternoon. "We buy piece by piece and then gather them into a parcel to sell to dealers," he says. Once the parcel of diamonds is sold to a licensed dealer, illegally mined diamonds are easily mixed in. Fillefaboa says he has no problem finding buyers, despite Sierra Leone's strict licensing laws, which ban illegal diamond dealing. Licenses are regarded as too costly and laws too cumbersome. "We are all illegal here," boasts the neighborhood's chief, Sahr Sam. "If the monitors come, we scatter." In reality, government monitors rarely come to Open Yei. There are only 200 for the entire country, sharing ten motorcycles donated by the U.S. Agency for International Development. "At every level people say to us, 'If you harass us, we will just smuggle the diamonds,'" says Dan Joe Hadji, a senior monitoring officer in Koidu. "So we allow people to move around and hope and pray that they find religion" -by obeying the law. Diamond producers and dealers frequently tout Sierra Leone as a Kimberley Process success story but, since its official exports soared from near zero in 1999 to about $142 million last year, suggesting that smuggling has plummeted. Not necessarily so: The official statistics cannot be proved, says Jan Ketelaar, mine manager of Koidu Holdings and a former diamond advisor to Sierra Leone's President. Worse, this year's exports are likely to drop about 10 percent, suggesting that bigger diamonds are being smuggled illegally, says a Western ambassador in Freetown who sits on a high-level diamond committee of diplomats and aid organizations but asked not to be identified. Director of Mines Alimany Wurie admits smuggling is widespread - perhaps as much as one-third of all Sierra Leone's diamonds. Enforcement is nearly impossible. The frontier with Liberia, whose diamonds are banned from world trade, is just 30 miles from Koidu and riddled with old smuggling routes and. Only three of the 36 Few border crossings into Guinea are guarded, says Hadji, and even those are left unmanned for a few days each month when border officials walk to town to collect their pay. Yet the rampant smuggling, though illegal, does not kill. And with peace restored in West Africa, it is tempting to think of blood diamonds as little more than a dramatic movie plot. Those who have witnessed Africa's bloodletting up close say it's a mistake to relegate the issue to history, because history could repeat itself. In any future conflict in the region, diamonds would be one of the surest ways with which to buy weapons. "Diamonds were very much the fuel for the war but not the root cause, and those root causes are still very much with us," says the Western ambassador. "Corruption, unemployment, poverty - I could well imagine another blood-diamond scenario here." aced with that stark possibility, diamond companies have begun trying to tackle the crippling poverty at the bottom of the industry, where, according to Global Witness, a British organization that has done extensive research on blood diamonds, about one million Africans earn pennies a day in the backbreaking and increasingly fruitless search for alluvial stones. Flying low over Koidu in a twin-propeller plane shows how daunting that task is. Hundreds of men can be seen bent low in the rivers around Koidu. "They are working in absolutely horrific conditions in the hopes of striking it rich, but the majority never do," says Susie Sanders, a Global Witness researcher. Little of the region's innate mineral wealth has filtered down to residents. "A billion dollars' worth of diamonds have come out of Sierra Leone in the last several years, and there is no electricity or water wells," says Rapaport, who toured the villages around Koidu last summer with his father, Martin, chairman of the Rapaport Group. Shaken by the chasm between the diggers and the diamond buyers, the Rapaports are trying to start a Fair Trade association of producers along the lines of Starbucks (Charts), which buys coffee beans for a premium price from some growers, then sells them for more money to socially conscious coffee drinkers. Rapaport is predicting that the current controversy over diamonds will jolt consumers into asking retailers probing questions about the gems' origins. If so, they are unlikely to find much information: Two years ago a survey of 40 major American retailers by Amnesty International and Global Witness found that almost none had policies in place against blood diamonds. Rapaport believes consumers would happily pay a little extra to ensure they are buying African diamonds mined for decent wages under humane conditions. "Our idea," he says, "is that Tiffany (Charts) is going to wake up one morning and see that Cartier is selling fair-trade jewelry and say, 'Oh, my God, we need to do that.' They will change not from an ethical point of view but from greed." In Koidu a U.S.-funded program trains diggers in how to grade and value the diamonds they find as a way of avoiding being fleeced by local traders. Last year De Beers and two activist organizations founded the Diamond Development Initiative, an international organization to train diggers in safety and economic issues, and ultimately to try to persuade many to grow crops instead. De Beers has begun a similar pilot training project in Tanzania, which it says it will replicate elsewhere in Africa if it is successful.  Lit But for 18-year-old Sahr Amara who all those projects seem abstract. His parents grow crops in a village about 20 miles from Koidu and cannot afford to buy his schoolbooks or pay his yearly tuition of 11 dollars to 35,000 leones ($11.66). "I would like to find a diamond so I can go back to school," Amara says. "If I stay digging at this site for a long time and find nothing, maybe I will leave and try to find a job somewhere." That would leaves Africa's 999,999 other diamond diggers still him searching for a dream.  Vivienne Walt 06 award-winning foreign correspondent, based in Paris, who has written for TIME Magazine since 2003. won the ASTMH Media Excellence award for her investigation into maternal mortality in Africa, and she was twice nominated for the Pulitzer for her work on Africa while a staff writer for Newsday. “Diamonds aren't forever” December 7 2006

Despite my privilege I am using the debate space to create a medium that allows people, like Sahr, to have a voice to speak of their oppression, where they previously had none.  The 1AC is an attempt to recognize the horrors that go with resource extraction in the real world and an attempt to deconstruct both the debate round and the real world to create an inclusionary discourse that allows individuals to both recognize their privilege and combat oppression.   
Thus, I advocate that all countries in Africa that currently extract diamonds will crease all operations and institute an embargo on all diamond related trade. I reserve the right to clarify.  Only the plan solves – past attempts to monitor diamond mining, such as the Kimberly Process have failed.  While a post-fiat implementation of the policy doesn’t actually end the conflicts, the discussion of both narratives and solutions to the problem is uniquely valuable since it allows us to recognize both are part in the problem and the solution.  ASC explains, 

Given their beauty, their worth, and the joy they often bring as symbols of love, we have trouble understanding that diamonds have caused great human suffering in parts of Africa. The illegal mining and selling of diamonds by rebels (groups opposed to legitimate governments) provides the money needed to buy guns and other weapons, which are being used not only to form fight against armies and, but to kill and injury innocent civilians, many of whom are children. Much of what we North Americans read about Africa or see on the TV news relates to violence and suffering in less than a dozen countries in Africa. We are often not given the opportunity to read, see, or hear about the nearly 40 countries in African which are not suffering from civil wars and violence. When we concentrate on stories of war and violence, we should try to find out as much as we can about the situation in order to better understand the reasons for the conflict, including ways in which we, North Americans, through what we buy and value, may be contributing to these conflicts, and how through our governments and relief organizations, we might also contribute to a solution to the conflicts. In this African current events feature, we are going to focus on one of three violent regional conflicts in Africa in which diamonds play an important role. This is the conflict in Sierra Leone. However, before looking at Sierra Leone it is important to point out that diamonds continue to affect conflicts in two other African countries: Angola, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. All three conflicts share several common factors: First, well organized rebel groups, often with support from neighboring countries and sometimes our own government, are fighting against governments which are recognized by the United Nations and the Organization of African Unity to be legitimate governments. Second, these rebel forces often use extreme forms of violence against local populations in their struggle for power. Third, state controlled armies often engage in similar human rights violation attempts to keep rebels at bay. Finally, the illegal mining and sale of diamonds enable rebel forces to purchase weapons and ammunition. These diamonds are sold, often without our knowledge, in Western American, Asian, and European stores. Without this outlet for illegally mined diamonds, rebel forces would not have as ready a source of money to support their warfare. ASC 13 (African Studies Center) Fill in cites later “Diamonds and Warfare: The Africa Connection” http://exploringafrica.matrix.msu.edu/students/events/diamondwar.php

While nobody in this room may ever experience the hardships of miners, or witness the horrors of the corrupt trade of diamonds, my unique position allows me to not only raise awareness for their hardships, but also point out how we unknowingly contribute to these problems. The problems of the diamond trade should not be trivialized; debate should be more than intellectual masturbation and absurd impact scenarios that make nuclear wars into mere body counts.  The narrative of the 1AC is a criticism of the norms of LD debate.  Instead of debating the implications of ivory tower philosophy, or use the suffering of millions to our advantage in DA scenarios, we should talk about the real lives the policies we are debating effect.  Mitchell explains,

While an isolated academic space that affords students an opportunity to learn in a protected environment has significant pedagogical value (see e.g. Coverstone 1995, p. 8-9), The notion of the academic debate tournament as a sterile laboratory carries with it some disturbing implications, when the metaphor is extended to its limit. To the extent that the academic space begins to take on characteristics of a laboratory, the barriers demarcating such a space from other spheres of deliberation beyond the school grow taller and less permeable. When such barriers reach insurmountable dimensions, argumentation in the academic setting unfolds on a purely simulated plane, with students practicing critical thinking and advocacy skills in strictly hypothetical thought-spaces. Although they may research and track public argument as it unfolds outside the confines of the laboratory for research purposes, in this approach, students witness argumentation beyond the walls of the academy as spectators, with little or no apparent recourse to directly participate or alter the course of events (see Mitchell 1995; 1998).   The sense of detachment associated with the spectator posture is highlighted when during episodes of alienation in which debaters cheer news of human suffering or misfortune. Instead of focusing on the visceral negative responses to news accounts of human death and misery, debaters overcome with the competitive zeal of contest round competition show a tendency to concentrate on how the meanings that such evidence might hold for the strength of their academic debate arguments. For example, news reports of mass starvation might tidy up the "uniqueness of a disadvantage" or bolster the "inherency of an affirmative case" (in the technical parlance of debate-speak). Murchland categorizes cultivation of this "spectator" mentality is as one of the most politically debilitating failures of contemporary education: "Educational institutions have failed even more grievously to provide a the kind of civic forums we need. In fact, one could easily conclude that the principle purposes of our schools is to deprive successor generations of their civic voice, to turn them into mute and uncomprehending spectators in the drama of political life" (1991, p. 8).  Complete reliance on the laboratory metaphor to guide pedagogical practice can result in the unfortunate foreclosure of crucial learning opportunities. These opportunities, which will be discussed in more detail in the later sections of this piece, center around the process of argumentative engagement with wider public spheres of deliberation. In the strictly preparatory model of argument pedagogy, such direct engagement is an activity that is appropriately pursued following the completion of academic debate training (see e.g. Coverstone 1995, p. 8). Preparatory study of argumentation, undertaken in the confines of the academic laboratory, is conducted on the plane of simulation and is designed to pave the way for eventual application of critical thinking and oral advocacy skills in "real world" contexts. Such a preparatory pedagogy has a tendency to defer reflection and theorization on the political dynamics of academic debate itself. For example, many textbooks introduce students to the importance of argumentation as the basis for citizenship in the opening chapter, move on to discussion of specific skills in the intervening chapters, and never return to the obvious broader question of how specific skills can be utilized for to support efforts of participatory citizenship and democratic empowerment. Insofar as the argumentation curriculum does not forthrightly thematize the connection between skill-based learning and democratic empowerment, the prospect that students will fully develop strong senses of transformative political agency grows increasingly remote. The undercultivation of student agency in the academic field of argumentation is a particularly pressing problem, since social theorists such as Foucault, Habermas and Touraine have proposed that information and communication have emerged as significant media of domination and exploitation in contemporary society. These scholars argue, in different ways, that new and particularly insidious means of social control have developed in recent times. These methods of control are insidious in the sense that they suffuse apparently open public spheres and structure opportunities for dialogue in subtle and often nefarious ways. Who has authority to speak in public forums? How does socioeconomic status determine access to information and close off spaces for public deliberation? Who determines what issues are placed on the agenda for public discussion? It is impossible to seriously consider these questions and still hew closely to the idea that a single, monolithic, essentialized "public sphere" even exists. Instead, multiple public spheres exist in diverse cultural and political milieux, and communicative practices work to transform and reweave continuously the normative fabric that holds them together. Some public spaces are vibrant and full of emancipatory potential, while others are colonized by restrictive institutional logics. Argumentation skills can be practiced in both contexts, but how can the utilization of such skills transform positively the nature of the public spaces where dialogue takes place? For students and teachers of argumentation, the heightened salience of this question should signal the danger that critical thinking and oral advocacy skills alone may not be sufficient for citizens to assert their voices in public deliberation. Institutional interests bent on shutting down dialogue and discussion may recruit new graduates skilled in argumentation and deploy them in information campaigns designed to neutralize public competence and short-circuit democratic decision-making (one variant of Habermas' "colonization of the lifeworld" thesis; see Habermas 1981, p. 376-373). Habermas sees the emergent capacity of capitalist institutions to sustain themselves by manufacturing legitimacy through strategic communication as a development that profoundly transforms the Marxist political dynamic. By colonizing terms and spaces of public dialogue with instrumental, strategically-motivated reasoning, institutions are said by Habermas to have engineered a "refeudalization" of the public sphere. In this distorted space for public discussion, corporations and the state forge a monopoly on argumentation and subvert critical deliberation by members of an enlightened, debating public. This colonization thesis supplements the traditional Marxist problematic of class exploitation by highlighting a new axis of domination, the way in which capitalist systems rely upon the strategic management of discourse as a mode of legitimation and exploitation. Indeed, the implicit bridge that connects argumentation skills to democratic empowerment in many argumentation textbooks crosses perilous waters, since institutions facing "legitimation crises" (see Habermas 1975) rely increasingly on recruitment and deployment of argumentative talent to manufacture public loyalty. In basic terms the notion of argumentative agency involves the capacity to contextualize and employ the skills and strategies of argumentative discourse in fields of social action, especially wider spheres of public deliberation. Pursuit of argumentative agency charges academic work with democratic energy by linking teachers and students with civic organizations, social movements, citizens and other actors engaged in live public controversies beyond the schoolyard walls. As a bridging concept, argumentative agency links decontextualized argumentation skills such as research, listening, analysis, refutation and presentation, to the broader political telos of democratic empowerment. Argumentative agency fills gaps left in purely simulation-based models of argumentation by focusing pedagogical energies on strategies for utilizing argumentation as a driver of progressive social change. Moving beyond an exclusively skill-oriented curriculum, teachers and students pursuing argumentative agency seek to put argumentative tools to the test by employing them in situations beyond the space of the classroom. This approach draws from the work of Kincheloe (1991), who suggests that through "critical constructivist action research," students and teachers cultivate their own senses of agency and work to transform the world around them. The sense of argumentative agency produced through action research is different in kind from those skills that are honed through academic simulation exercises such as policy debate tournaments. Encounters with broader public spheres beyond the realm of the academy can deliver unique pedagogical possibilities and opportunities. By anchoring their work in public spaces, students and teachers can use their talents to change the trajectory of events, while events are still unfolding. These experiences have the potential to trigger significant shifts in political awareness on the part of participants. Academic debaters nourished on an exclusive diet of competitive contest round experience often come to see politics like a picturesque landscape whirring by through the window of a speeding train. They study this political landscape in great detail, rarely (if ever) entertaining the idea of stopping the train and exiting to alter the course of unfolding events. The resulting spectator mentality deflects attention away from roads that could carry their arguments to wider spheres of public argumentation. However, on the occasions when students and teachers set aside this spectator mentality by directly engaging broader public audiences, key aspects of the political landscape change, because the point of reference for experiencing the landscape shifts fundamentally. In the Truman Show, the lead character is born into a "hyperreal" (see Baudrillard 1983) life of pure simulation, where thousands of tiny hidden cameras record his every move for a world-wide, live television audience. Truman can only break through the illusion that his life is a staged event by realizing eventually that he has the power to change the set, and thereby disrupt the carefully scripted storyline of the "show." Likewise, academic debaters possess considerable latent agency to change the set that serves as the backdrop for their discussions in policy debate tournaments. They can accomplish this by turning their attention beyond a narrow exclusive focus on competitive success in tournament contest rounds and toward possible roles they might play in broader fields of social action. The resulting shift in perspective changes fundamentally the dynamics of academic debate by foregrounding the central purpose of the activity: to serve as a medium of democratic empowerment. The notion of argumentative agency is not only important for the task of lending weight to projects in debate oriented toward the telos of democratic empowerment. The pursuit of action research carries intrinsic transformative benefits in the form of concrete political change. Building on Felski's argument that "it is not tenable to assume that hermetically sealed forums for discussion and debate can function as truly oppositional spaces of discourse" (1989, p. 171), Giroux points to Foucault and Gramsci as scholars who have made engagement with broader public spheres a matter of academic responsibility. Academics can no longer retreat into their careers, classrooms, or symposiums as if they were the only public spheres available for engaging the power of ideas and the relations of power. Foucault's (1977) notion of the specific intellectual taking up struggles connected to particular issues and contexts must be combined with Gramsci's (1971) notion of the engaged intellectual who connects his or her work to broader social concerns that deeply affect how people live, work, and survive (Giroux 1991, p. 57; see also Giroux 1988, p. 35).  Within the limited horizon of zero-sum competition in the contest round framework for academic debate, questions of purpose, strategy, and practice tend to collapse into formulaic axioms for competitive success under the crushing weight of tournament pressure. The purpose of debate becomes unrelenting pursuit of victory at a zero-sum game. Strategies are developed to gain competitive edges that translate into contest round success. Debate practice involves debaters "spewing" a highly technical, specialized discourse at expert judges trained to understand enough of the speeches to render decisions. Even in "kritik rounds," where the political status and meaning of the participants' own discourse is up for grabs, (see Shanahan 1993) the contest round framework tends to freeze the discussion into bipolar, zero-sum terms that highlight competitive payoffs at the expense of opportunities for co-operative "rethinking."  When the cultivation of argumentative agency is pursued as a central pedagogical goal in academic debate, questions of purpose, strategy, and practice take on much broader meanings. The purpose of participating in debate gets extended beyond just winning contest rounds (although that purpose does not need to be abandoned completely), as debaters intervene in public affairs directly to affect social change, and in the process, bolster their own senses of political agency. In this approach, debate strategy begins to bear a resemblance to social movement strategizing, with questions of timing, coalition-building, and publicity taking on increasing importance. Finally, debate practice itself becomes dynamic as debaters invent new forms of argumentative expression tailored specifically to support particular projects of political intervention into fields of social action.  Gordon Mitchell 1998 (Upitt prof of Comm and coach) "Pedagogical possibilities for argumentative agency in academic debate" Argumentation and Advocacy; Fall98, Vol. 35 Issue 2, pg. Ebsco/

The speech act of the 1AC is a criticism of how LD turns debate into a laboratory through countless theory shells, massive impact scenarios, and abstract philosophies that claim stakes in fairness and education while paradoxically ignoring the actual violations of fairness and atrocities that occur in everyday life that we subconsciously support.  
The judge must play the role of the intellectual, as the ballot has the power to determine what advocacy is endorsed in this round and beyond.  As an intellectual the judge has the paramount obligation to not only deconstruct truth, but also ascertain the possibility of new truth.  Foucault explains,

It seems to me that what must now be taken into account in The intellectual is not the ‘bearer of universal values.’  Rather, it’s the person occupying a specific position – but whose specificity is linked, in a society like ours, to the general functioning of an apparatus of truth.  In other words, the intellectual has a three-fold specificity: that of his class position (whether as petty-bourgeois in the service of capitalism or ‘organic’ intellectual of the proletariat); that of his conditions of life and work, linked to his condition as an intellectual (his field of research, his place in a laboratory, and political and economy demands to which he submits of against which he rebels, in the university, the hospital, etc.); lastly, the specificity of the politics of truths in our societies. And it’s with this last factor that their his position can take on a general significance and that his local, specific struggle can have effects and implications which are not simply professional or sectorial.  The intellectual can operate and struggle at the general level of that regime of truth which is so essential to the structure and functioning of our society.  There is a battle ‘for truth,’ or at least ‘around truth’ – it being understood once again that by truth I do not mean ‘the ensemble of truths which are to be discovered and accepted,’ but rather ‘the ensemble of rules according to which the true and false are separated and specific effects of power attached to the true’, it being understood also that it’s not a matter of a battle ‘on behalf’ of the truth, but of a battle about the status of truth and the economic and political role it plays.  It is necessary to think of the political problems of intellectuals not in terms of ‘science’ and ‘ideology’, but in terms of ‘truth’ and ‘power’.  And thus the question of the professionalization of intellectuals and the division between intellectual and manual labour can be envisaged in a new way.  All this must seem very confused and uncertain.  Uncertain indeed, and what I am saying here is above all to be taken as a hypothesis. In order for it to be a little less confused, however, I would like to put forward a few ‘propositions’ – not firm assertions, but simply suggestions to be further tested and explained.  ‘Truth’ is to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation and operation of statements.  ‘Truth’ is linked in a circular relation with system of powers which produces and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it.  A regime of truth.  This regime is not merely ideological or superstructural; it was a condition of the formation and development of capitalism.  And it’s this same regime which is, subject to certain modifications, operates in the socialists countries (I leave open here the question of China, about which I know little).  The essential political problem for the intellectual is not to criticize the ideological contents supposedly linked to science, or to ensure that his own scientific practice is accompanied by a correct ideology, but that of ascertaining the possibility of constitution a new politics of truth.  The problem is not changing people’s consciousness’s – or what’s in their heads – but the political, economic, institutional regime of the production of truth.  It’s not a matter of emancipating truth from every system of power (which would be a chimera, for truth is already power) but of detaching the power of truth from the forms of hegemony, social economic and cultural, within which it operates at the present time.  Michel Foucault, “Power and Knowledge,” 1980, Print.

All intellectuals, by definition, must constantly ascertain the possibility of new truth, as the significance of being an intellectual is play a role in determine not only what is considered true, but also the purpose of that truth. This is the most important role of the judge because normative thought that is not constantly critiqued becomes a meaningless list of self-righteous rules that bankrupts our thought.  Schlag explains,

Normative legal thought cannot wait to enlist epistemology, semiotics, social theory or any other enterprise in its own ethical-moral argument structures about the right, the good, the useful, the efficient (or any of their doctrinally crystallized derivatives). It cannot wait to reduce world views, attitudes, demonstrations, provocations, and thought itself, to norms. In short, it cannot wait to tell you (or somebody else) what to do. In fact, normative legal thought is so much in a hurry that it will tell you what to do even though there is not the slightest chance that you can’t might actually be in a position to do it. For instance, when was the last time you were in a position to put the difference principle into effect, or to restructure the doctrinal corpus of the first amendment? “In the future, we should ….” When was the last time you were in a position to rule whether judges should become pragmatists, efficiency purveyors, civic republicans, or Hercules surrogates? Normative legal thought doesn’t seem overly concerned with such worldly questions about the character and the effectiveness of its own discourse. It just goes along and proposes, recommends, prescribes, solves, and resolves. Yet despite its obvious desire to have worldly effects, worldly consequences, normative legal thought remains seemingly unconcerned with that for all practical purposes, its only consumers are legal academics and perhaps a few law students – persons who are virtually never in a position to put any of its wonderful normative advice into effect. If there’s no one in charge at the other end of the line, why then is normative legal thought in such a hurry to get its message across? And why, particularly, is it always in such a hurry to repeat the same old boring moves? There is an edge to these questions. And the edge comes in part from our implicit assumption that normative legal thought is a kind of that and that, as thought, it is in control of its own situation, its form, its own rhetoric. But it isn’t so. If normative legal thought keeps repeating itself, and if it is incapable of understanding challenges to its own intellectual authority, that is because it is not simply or even fundamentally a kind of thought. Normative legal thought is in part a routine – our routine. It is the highly repetitive, cognitively entrenched, institutionally sanctioned, and politically enforced routine of the legal academy – a routine that silently produces our thoughts and keeps our work channeled within the same old cognitive and rhetorical matrices. Like most routines, it has been so well internalized that we repeat it automatically, without thinking. Schlag, Pierre. 1999. Normativity and the Politics of Form. University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Vol 139 No. 4. pp 801-932. 

The practice of the 1AC is not earth shattering, nor is it revolutionary. It is just accepting the inevitable conclusion that what we say matters.  The narrative isn’t some nonsensical philosophical spiel; it is a topical advocacy that is an attempt to challenge what we think we know through stories.  The narrative is the best solution because it allows us to feel the other, and to put a face on the thousands of lives we talk about in everyday debate.  Rowland explains,

The important rhetorical point about setting in narrative is that stories can transport us out of our here and now and put us in places very different from our own world. As I write this chapter, I am sitting in Lawrence, Kansas, a progressive (for Kansas) college town in the American Midwest. But through Narrative, a skillful rhetor could transport me to Auschwitz, the battle of Gettysburg, or any other place or time in our human history. As a consequence, narrative can be used to break down barriers to human understanding. It is difficult for early twenty-first-century Americans to understand the horrors of the Holocaust. But through narrative, Elie Wiesel and others have taken us to Auschwitz and made us see the horrors of the death camps. The second rhetorical function of narrative is to create a sense of identification between the audience and the narrator or characters in the narrative. Great novels such as Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird played a role in the civil rights movement because they helped create a sense of identification between white and black Americans. Lee's novel and many other stories showed the audience that the black characters in the books were people just like them. Similarly, narrative can allow us to see the world through the eyes of a Palestinian terrorist and understand what might drive him or her to terrorist acts. One of the most powerful functions of narrative is to generate in the reader/viewer/listener the understanding that "I'm like him or her." Rowland, Robert C. (2005). “The Narrative Perspective.” Chapter Eight. In J.A. Kuypers (Ed.), The Art of Rhetorical Criticism. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Page 138.

Thus, the advocacy of the 1AC insists that we listen to the stories of individuals, like Sahr Amara, in order to better understand why and how certain cruelties are occurring.  My opponents strategy, be it theory or a disad, ought to be rejected on face because it merely furthers this abhorrent system. Thus, because the struggles of diamond miners are those that should be faced by no human being, I affirm.

Tournament: ToC | Round: 2 | Opponent: Any | Judge: Any
Part 1 is the Confrontation. A critical genealogy of Western metaphysics reveals an insidious dualism between the human and the non-human that oppressively privileges the viewpoint of the human that justified and facilitated the domination of all that is considered non-human. This reckless transcendence from nature has led humanity to create a “myth of progress,” which even further separates humans from nature. This neglect of nature, however, will come back and haunt us and threaten all of humanity.  Kingsworth and Hine  explain,

Bertrand Russell caught this vein in Conrad’s worldview, suggesting that the novelist ‘thought of civilised and morally tolerable human life as a dangerous walk on a thin crust of barely cooled lava which at any moment might break and let the unwary sink into fiery depths.’ What both Russell and Conrad were getting at was a simple fact which any historian could confirm: Human civilisation is an intensely fragile construction. It is built on little more than belief: belief in the rightness of its values; belief in the strength of its system of law and order; belief in its currency; above all, perhaps, belief in its future. Once that belief begins to crumble, the collapse of a civilisation may become unstoppable. That civilisations fall, sooner or later, is as much a law of history as gravity is a law of physics. What remains are after the fall is a wild mixture of cultural debris, confused and angry people whose certainties have betrayed them, and those forces which were always there, deeper than the foundations of the city walls: the desire to survive and the desire for meaning. It is, it seems, our civilisation’s turn to experience the inrush of the savage and the unseen; our turn to be brought up short by contact with untamed reality. There is a fall coming. We live in an age in which familiar restraints are being kicked away, and foundations snatched from under us. After a quarter century of complacency, in which we were invited to believe in bubbles that would never burst, prices that would never fall, the end of history, the crude repackaging of the triumphalism of Conrad’s Victorian twilight — Hubris has been introduced to Nemesis. Now a familiar human story is being played out. It is the story of an empire corroding from within. It is the story of a people who believed, for a long time, that their actions did not have consequences. It is the story of how that people will cope with the crumbling of their own myth. It is our story. This time, the crumbling empire is the unassailable global economy, and the brave new world of consumer democracy being forged worldwide in its name. Upon the indestructibility of this edifice we have pinned the hopes of this latest phase of our civilisation. Now, its failure and fallibility exposed, the world’s elites are scrabbling frantically to buoy up an economic machine which, for decades, they told us needed little restraint, for restraint would be its undoing. Uncountable sums of money are being funnelled upwards in order to prevent an uncontrolled explosion. The machine is stuttering and the engineers are in panic. They are wondering if perhaps they do not understand it as well as they imagined. They are wondering whether they are controlling it at all or whether, perhaps, it is controlling them. Increasingly, people are restless. The engineers group themselves into competing teams, but neither side seems to know what to do, and neither seems much different from the other. Around the world, discontent can be heard. The extremists are grinding their knives and moving in as the machine’s coughing and stuttering exposes the inadequacies of the political oligarchies who claimed to have everything in hand. Old gods are rearing their heads, and old answers: revolution, war, ethnic strife. Politics as we have known it totters, like the machine it was built to sustain. In its place could easily arise something more elemental, with a dark heart. As the financial wizards lose their powers of levitation, as the politicians and economists struggle to conjure new explanations, it starts to dawn on us that behind the curtain, at the heart of the Emerald City, sits not the benign and omnipotent invisible hand we had been promised, but something else entirely. Something responsible for what Marx, writing not so long before Conrad, cast as the ‘everlasting uncertainty and anguish’ of the ‘bourgeois epoch’; a time in which ‘all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.’ Draw back the curtain, follow the tireless motion of cogs and wheels back to its source, and you will find the engine driving our civilisation: the myth of progress. The myth of progress is to us what the myth of god-given warrior prowess was to the Romans, or the myth of eternal salvation was to the conquistadors: without it, our efforts cannot be sustained. Onto the root stock of Western Christianity, the Enlightenment at its most optimistic grafted a vision of an Earthly paradise, towards which human effort guided by calculative reason could take us. Following this guidance, each generation will live a better life than the life of those that went before it. History becomes an escalator, and the only way is up. On the top floor is human perfection. It is important that this should remain just out of reach in order to sustain the sensation of motion. Recent history, however, has given this mechanism something of a battering. The past century too often threatened a descent into hell, rather than the promised heaven on Earth. Even within the prosperous and liberal societies of the West progress has, in many ways, failed to deliver the goods. Today’s generation are demonstrably less content, and consequently less optimistic, than those that went before. They work longer hours, with less security, and less chance of leaving behind the social back- ground into which they were born. They fear crime, social breakdown, overdevelopment, environmental collapse. They do not believe that the future will be better than the past. Individually, they are less constrained by class and convention than their parents or grandparents, but more constrained by law, surveillance, state proscription and personal debt. Their physical health is better, their mental health more fragile. Nobody knows what is coming. Nobody wants to look. Most significantly of all, there is an underlying darkness at the root of everything we have built. Outside the cities, beyond the blurring edges of our civilisation, at the mercy of the machine but not under its control, lies something that neither Marx nor Conrad, Caesar nor Hume, Thatcher nor Lenin ever really understood. Something that Western civilisation — which has set the terms for global civilisation—was never capable of understanding, because to understand it would be to undermine, fatally, the myth of  that civilisation. Something upon which that thin crust of lava is balanced; which feeds the machine and all the people who run it, and which they have all trained themselves not to see. The myth of progress is founded on the myth of nature. The first tells us that we are destined for greatness; the second tells us that greatness is cost-free. Each is intimately bound up with the other. Both tell us that we are apart from the world; that we began grunting in the primeval swamps, as a humble part of something called ‘nature’, which we have now triumphantly subdued. The very fact that we have a word for ‘nature’ is 5 evidence that we do not regard ourselves as part of it. Indeed, our separation from it is a myth integral to the triumph of our civilisation. We are, we tell ourselves, the only species ever to have attacked nature and won. In this, our unique glory is contained. Outside the citadels of self-congratulation, lone voices have cried out against this infantile version of the human story for centuries, But it is only in the last few decades that its inaccuracy has become laughably apparent. We are the first generations to grow up surrounded by evidence that our attempt to separate ourselves from ‘nature’ has been a grim failure, proof not of our genius but our hubris. The attempt to sever the hand from the body has endangered the ‘progress’ we hold so dear, and it has endangered much of ‘nature’ too. The resulting upheaval underlies the crisis we now face. We imagined ourselves isolated from the source of our existence. The fallout from this imaginative error is all around us: a quarter of the world’s mammals are threatened with imminent extinction; an acre and a half of rainforest is felled every second; 75 of the world’s fish stocks are on the verge of collapse; humanity consumes 25 more of the world’s natural ‘products’ than the Earth can replace — a figure predicted to rise to 80 by mid-century. Even through the deadening lens of statistics, we can glimpse the violence to which our myths have driven us. And over it all looms runaway climate change. Climate change, which threatens to render all human projects irrelevant; which presents us with detailed evidence of our lack of understanding of the world we inhabit while, at the same time, demonstrating that we are still entirely reliant upon it. Climate change, which highlights in painful colour the head-on crash between civilisation and ‘nature’; which makes plain, more effectively than any carefully constructed argument or optimistically defiant protest, how the machine’s need for permanent growth will require us to destroy ourselves in its name. Climate change, which brings home at last our ultimate powerlessness. These are the facts, or some of them. Yet facts never tell the whole story. (‘Facts’, Conrad wrote, in Lord Jim, ‘as if facts could prove anything.’) The facts of environmental crisis we hear so much about often conceal as much as they expose. We hear daily about the impacts of our activities on ‘the environment’ (like ‘nature’, this is an expression which distances us from the reality of our situation). Daily we hear, too, of the many ‘solutions’ to these problems: solutions which usually involve the necessity of urgent political agreement and a judicious application of human technological genius. Things may be changing, runs the narrative, but there is nothing we cannot deal with here, folks. We perhaps need to move faster, more urgently. Certainly we need to accelerate the pace of research and development. We accept that we must become more ‘sustainable’. But everything will be fine. 

Despite the attempts to fix the machines of civilization through half-hearted measures of sustainability, and political reform, we are still headed for catastrophe.  Solutions to regulate extractive industries and consumption are merely a façade created by the ruling class to preserve their power and do not actually address the anthropocentric mindset behind the “myth of progress.” Anthropocentrism is both the original and foundational hierarchy that structures all oppression.  Best  explains,

Hierarchy emerged when with the rise of agricultural society some ten thousand years ago. In the shift from nomadic hunting and gathering bands to settled agricultural practices, humans began to establish their dominance over animals through “domestication.” In animal domestication (often a euphemism disguising coercion and cruelty), humans began to exploit animals for purposes such as obtaining food, milk, clothing, plowing, and transportation. As they gained increasing control over the lives and labor power of animals, humans bred them for desired traits and controlled them in various ways, such as castrating males to make them more docile. To conquer, enslave, and claim animals as their own property, humans developed numerous technologies, such as pens, cages, collars, ropes, chains, and branding irons. The domination of animals paved the way for the domination of humans. The sexual subjugation of women, Patterson suggests, was modeled after the domestication of animals, such that men began to control women’s reproductive capacity, to enforce repressive sexual norms, and to rape them as they forced breeding in their animals. Not coincidentally, Patterson argues, slavery emerged in the same region of the Middle East that spawned agriculture, and, in fact, developed as an extension of animal domestication practices. In areas like Sumer, slaves were managed like livestock, and males were castrated and forced to work along with females. In the fifteenth century, when Europeans began the colonization of Africa and Spain introduced the first international slave markets, the metaphors, models, and technologies used to exploit animals slaves were applied with equal cruelty and force to human slaves. Stealing Africans from their native environment and homeland, breaking up families who scream in anguish, wrapping chains around slaves’ bodies, shipping them in cramped quarters across continents for weeks or months with no regard for their needs or suffering, branding their skin with a hot iron to mark them as property, auctioning them as servants, breeding them for service and labor, exploiting them for profit, beating them in rages of hatred and anger, and killing them in vast numbers – all these horrors and countless others inflicted on black slaves were developed and perfected centuries earlier through animal exploitation. As the domestication of animals developed in agricultural society, humans lost the intimate connections they once had with animals. By the time of Aristotle, certainly, and with the bigoted assistance of medieval theologians such as St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, western humanity had developed an explicitly hierarchical worldview – that came to be known as the “Great Chain of Being” – used to position humans as the end to which all other beings were mere means.  Patterson underscores the crucial point that the domination of human over human and its exercise through slavery, warfare, and genocide typically begins with the denigration of victims. 

This implies that anthropocentrism is the controlling impact.  The subjugation of other humans is premised on the belief that it is permissible to oppression that which is considered “lesser” than human, which means that unless we first deal with anthropocentrism all other forms of oppression are inevitable.  

The alternative is to abandon the idea of resource extraction in favor of an ethical reorientation that aims to include the interests of environmental protection in our decision-making process. The idea of “sustainable” extraction is the very same idea that invisibly supports the anthropocentric regime that corrupts our decision-making.  Our obsession with the “human” is flawed; and instead we must embrace a view that inclusionary of all life.  Kahn  explains,  

When Freire's work is engaged by the reality of the current ecological crisis, it provides immediate historical insight as to why The people of the Third World, along with other species of the Earth, have been consistently denied the rights and privileges accorded those living amidst the advanced capitalist nations -- there is a logic of domination at work.  As Freire theorizes, it has always been the mindset of the oppressors to see themselves as “human,” while those that they prey upon are always less than such; like animals, they are barred from the prospects of history and the possibilities inherent in liberatory conduct. 2   Therefore, it is of little surprise that people in the Third World and species everywhere currently bear the great burdens of “sustainable development,” uttered by the global oppressors as a cure-all for all those already suffering from the previous legacy of development and imposed transformation of their lifeworlds.  According to Freire's own thinking, we who stand with the global oppressed should then be especially dubious, if not in outright objection, of such top-down policy initiatives as proposed by global states and federations -- policies that are formed by those who live in great opulence and ease but which are always directed at those surrounded by despair.  Duly informed by the Pedagogy of the Oppressed, we might suggest that in contradistinction to the many terrors now foisted by states and state-minded organizations upon the world, we need not globalization-from-above, but globalization-from-below. 3 The idea of mixing a thorough-going critique of power with a sort of Gramscian-inspired, counter-hegemonic alliance politics is certainly not new within the Freirean legacy.  I think it is fair to point to movements as diverse as Critical Pedagogy, the Poststructural--Marxism promoted by Laclau and Mouffe, recent forms of Revolutionary Multiculturalism and to Borderland Feminism as promoting a sort of Freireanism fit for today's anti-globalization set.  Yet, as bell hooks herself testifies, this updating of Freire's work was often achieved only with great anguish.  Only after concerted effort were feminist, post-colonial, and multicultural criticisms of Pedagogy of the Oppressed allowed to stand and be heard within the Freirean corpus. 4   Now, as we stand smack dab in the middle of a planetary eco-crisis, a catastrophe in which global powers will destroy the peoples and cultures of the Third World along with the species and habitats of their regions, I would like to ask: Is Freire's work in a position to mediate and speak with both those who stand beside the global poor and destitute and those whose deepest commitment is to the entirety of the natural kingdom?  Can the Freirean corpus itself find agreement with the multi-faceted movement for eco-justice? In his book, The Enemy of Nature, Joel Kovel begins by documenting The terrible legacy of human resource degradation (and its consequence for humanity) that spans the thirty-odd years that have now elapsed since the first Earth Day and the release of the Club of Rome's benchmark economic treatise The Limits to Growth. Echoing the findings of eminent environmental and ecological groups and personages such as The Union of Concerned Scientists, Edward O. Wilson, and Peter Raven, the picture that emerges from Kovel's work is that of an institutionalized, transnational, phase-changing neo-liberalism that is loosed as a cancer upon the Earth, a form of “endless growth” political economy that is literally over producing and consuming the planet to death in the attempt to stave off its own demise. 5 Wholly without precedent, human population has nearly doubled during this time period, increasing by 2.5 billion people. Similarly, markets have continued to worship the gods of speed and quantity and refused to conserve themselves. The use and extraction of “fossil fuel” resources like oil, coal, and natural gas -- the non-renewable energy stockpiles -- followed and exceeded the trends set by the population curve despite many years of warnings about the consequences inherent in their over-use and extraction, and this has led to a corresponding increase in the carbon emissions known to be responsible for global warming. Likewise, tree consumption for paper products doubled over the last thirty years, resulting in about half of the planet's forests disappearing, while in the oceans, global fishing also doubled. Further, since the end of the 1960's, half of the planet's wetlands have either been filled or drained for development, and nearly half of the Earth's soils have been agriculturally degraded. 6 All these trends are increasing and most are accelerating. 7 Even during what amounts to a current economic downturn, markets and development continue to flow and evolve, the globalization of technocapital fueling a yet another vast reconstruction and hegemonic reintegration of the myriad planetary political, economic, and socio-cultural forces into a futuristic “network society.” 8 Over the last thirty years then, humanity has exploded like a shock wave across the face of the Earth, one which has led to an exponential increase of transnational marketplaces and startling achievements in science and technology, but which has also had devastating effects upon the planetary eco-system. Perhaps most telling has been the parallel tendency over this time period towards mass extinction for the great diversity of species deemed non-human, including vast numbers of mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians. Comparing the numbers involved in this catastrophe with the handful of other great extinctions existing within the prehistoric record has led the esteemed paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey to coin this age of technocapitalism as the time of “the Sixth Extinction,” a great vanishing of creatures in the last thirty years such as the planet had not seen during the previous sixty-five million. 9 But, lest we make the mistake of thinking that our present globalization crisis unfolds along the simple lines of human flourishing and resource wasting, it should be noted that even as world gross economic product has nearly tripled since 1970, these gains have been pocketed by a relatively few advanced capitalist nations at the expense of the poor. 10 Recently, the UN United Nations Development Programme issued its Human Development Report 1999 which found that the top twenty percent of the people living in advanced capitalist nations have eighty-six percent of the world GDP and gross domestic product, control eighty two percent of the world export markets, initiate sixty-eight percent of all foreign direct investment, and possess seventy-four percent of the communication wires. Meanwhile, the bottom twenty percent of the people hailing from the poorest nations represent only about one percent of each category respectively. 11 The divide between rich and poor has been gravely exacerbated, with the gap between the two nearly doubling itself from an outrageous factor of 44:1 in 1973 to about 72:1 as of the year 2000. Much of this is directly related to a series of loans begun by the World Bank and the World Trade Organization in the 1990's, which ultimately increased Third World debt by a factor of eight compared with pre globalization figures. 12 So, as approximately 1.2 billion people live on less than $1 per day and nearly 3 billion live on less than $2 per day, the dizzy heights of global technocapitalism have been unfortunate indeed for nearly half of the human population. 13 Globalization has been especially torturous upon poor women and children, who are denied basic human rights en masse and who, in the attempt to combat their situations of mass starvation and homelessness, enter by the millions each year into the relations of slave-labor and the horrors of the global sex trade. Even more tragically, millions of additional poor (many of whom are women and children) have been violently pressed into the circumstance of outright slavery! Thus, when this is properly related to the conditions fostered upon the Third World by The explosion of transnational capitalist development over the last few decades, we can agree with the critical feminist Rhonda Hammer that these very same cultural, economic and political practices by the hegemonic powers constitute a form of global “family terrorism” meant to oppress those most in need of help. 14 New advances in capitalist lifestyle and practice are then directly responsible for grave exacerbations of widespread poverty and environmental destruction; and in many ways, the exploitation of the environment and of the poor by the rich has become to be integrated as so as to be part of one process -- the globalization of technocapitalism. 15  Interestingly, it was only very recently, in Johannesburg, South Africa, at the U.N.'s World Summit for Sustainable Development, that the plight of the poor and of species everywhere was again expressed as being a result of the sort of “unsustainable development” that has been the planetary norm over the last thirty years. However, sadly, due to pressure by the Bush administration and by other world powers, the conservation of the environment was essentially shelved as a policy agenda and the prescription for poor nations was, ironically, even more transnational capitalist development, market expansion, and resource extraction.  Kofi Annan ended the summit by proclaiming, “This is not the end.  It's the beginning.” 17   But, in fact, the W.S.S.D. was but the latest in a 30-year lineage of world summits stretching back across the recent history of globalization, to the first of its kind in Stockholm.  As we can see then, Annan's promise of change is more appropriately interpreted as a curse.  The present standard of living enjoyed by those across the planet is estimated to utilize somewhere between two to four times the amount of sustainable resources provided by the planet.  As population continues to rise toward 9 billion people and living standards increase in commensurate measure, it is calculated that to have a sustainable planet by the year 2070 would entail technical advances capable of enabling 60 times as much production and consumption as presently afforded, while only generating one-half to one-third the amount of present resource and environmental cost. 18   Yet, according to the U.N.'s own UNEP GEO-3 report, released just prior to the summit, a vision of continued growth of this kind is consonant only with extinction; either great changes are made in global lifestyle now or an irrevocable crisis will descend upon the planet by 2032.

Only by engaging in ecopedagogy – an attempt to foster an appreciation for social justice throughout the world with an inclusion of the environment in our decision-making – can we hope to end the anthropocentric mindset.  Unless humans accept their hubris and understand that they too are a vital and integrated part of the environment, they will continue to be guided by destructive and corrupt mindsets.  Kahn 2 explains,

Education is critical for promoting sustainable development and improving the capacity for people to address environment and development issues...It is critical for achieving environmental and ethical awareness, values and attitudes, skills and behavior consistent with sustainable development and for effective public participation in decision making.  In 1994, the founding director of the United Nations Environment Programme and organizer of the Rio Earth Summit, Maurice Strong, along with Mikhail Gorbachev renewed interest in the Earth Charter and received a pledge of support from the Dutch government.  This led to a provisional draft of the document being attempted in 1997, with the completion, ratification, and launching of the Earth Charter Initiative at the Peace Palace in the Hague occurring on June 29, 2000.  The initiative’s goal was to build a “sound ethical foundation for the emerging global society and to help build a sustainable world based on respect for nature, universal human rights, economic justice, and a culture of peace.” While hardly a perfect document or initiative, the Earth Charter’s announced mission was still nothing short of revolutionary, as it attempted a bold educational reformulation of how humans should perceive their cultural relationship to nature, thereby casting environmental and socio-economic/political problems together in one light and demanding long-term, integrated response to the growing planetary social and ecological problems.  It was hoped that at the 2002 Earth Summit meetings in Johannesburg, South Africa (i.e., the World Summit for Sustainable Development) the United Nations would adopt and endorse the Earth Charter.  However, the summit proved disappointing in may respects, and while Kofi Annan optimistically closed the summit by announcing that $235 million worth of public-private partnerships had been achieved because of the conference and that this put sustainable development strategies firmly on the map, social and environmental activists found the World Summit for Sustainable Development to be a sham for mostly the same reasons.  Thus, the W$$D (as its critics called it, due to its apparent pro-business agenda and bad taste in staging an Olympics-style, posh event on the outskirts of the Soweto shantytowns’ appalling poverty) articulated a central divide between large-scale corporate and government technocrats and the more grassroots-based theorists, activists, and educators proper.  As a result of the considerable pressure exerted by the U.S. delegates (and the additional political and economic interests of the other large states and non-governmental organizations, the 2002 summit ultimately refused to consider ratification of the holistic, pointedly socialist in spirit, and non-anthropocentric Earth Charter educational framework.  Instead, the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development was announced by the U.N. in 2005 and education for sustainable was promoted as the new crucial educational field to be integrated across the disciplines and at all levels of schooling. A leading international critic of environmental education has been Edgar Gonzalez-Gaudiano, who rightly charges that all-too-often the theories, policies, and discursive themes of environmental education have represented voices of the advanced capitalized nations of the global North, as the perspectives of the global South were ignored.  For Gonzalez-Gaudiano this means that the issue of environmental justice, which highlights the cultural racism inherent in mainstream sustainable (and unsustainable) development strategies, is problematically overlooked by most educational programs we must currently dealing with environmental issues.  In opposition, he has developed an intersectional ecological concept of “human security” that could displace commonplace ideas of national security in favor of a problem-posing pedagogy that seeks knowledge of how the environmental factors that contribute to disease, famine, unemployment, crime, social conflict, political repression and other forms of sexual, ethnic or religious violence can be examined as complex social and economic problems deserving of everyone’s attention.  

Part 2 is Framework.  Ivory tower philosophical theorizing is bankrupt since it willfully separates debaters from the real world rendering itself obsolete.  It allows debaters to fiat utopian solutions to problems without first forcing us to engage with the mindsets that cause those problems in the first place.  This requires a change in the way the judge evaluates the round because it is our role as intellectuals to undermine the totalizing assumptions and myths behind our civilization.  Kingsworth and Hine 2 explain,

Humans have always lived by stories, and those with skill in telling them have been treated with respect and, often, a certain wariness. Beyond the limits of reason, reality remains mysterious, as incapable of being approached directly as a hunter’s quarry. With stories, with art, with symbols and layers of meaning, we stalk those elusive aspects of reality that go undreamed of in our philosophy. The storyteller weaves the mysterious into the fabric of life, lacing it with the comic, the tragic, the obscene, making safe paths through dangerous territory. Yet as the myth of civilisation deepened its grip on our thinking, borrowing the guise of science and reason, we began to deny the role of stories, to dismiss their power as something primitive, childish, outgrown. The old tales by which generations had made sense of life’s subtleties and strangenesses were bowdlerised and packed off to the nursery. Religion, that bag of myths and mysteries, birthplace of the theatre, was straightened out into a framework of universal laws and moral account-keeping. The dream visions of the Middle Ages became the nonsense stories of Victorian childhood. In the age of the novel, stories were no longer the way to approach the deep truths of the world, so much as a way to pass time on a train journey. It is hard, today, to imagine that the word of a poet was once feared by a king. Yet for all this, our world is still shaped by stories. Through television, film, novels and video games, we may be more thoroughly bombarded with narrative material than any people that ever lived. What is peculiar, however, is the carelessness with which these stories are channelled at us — as entertainment, a distraction from daily life, something to hold our attention to the other side of the ad break. There is little sense that these things make up the equipment by which we navigate reality. On the other hand, there are the serious stories told by economists, politicians, geneticists and corporate leaders. These are not presented as stories at all, but as direct accounts of how the world is. Choose between competing versions, then fight with those who chose differently. The ensuing conflicts play out on early morning radio, in afternoon debates and late night television pundit wars. And yet, for all the noise, what is striking is how much the opposing sides agree on: all their stories are only variants of the larger story of human centrality, of our ever-expanding control over ‘nature’, our right to perpetual economic growth, our ability to transcend all limits. So we find ourselves, our ways of telling unbalanced, trapped inside a runaway narrative, headed for the worst kind of encounter with reality. In such a moment, writers, artists, poets and storytellers of all kinds have a critical role to play. Creativity remains the most uncontrollable of human forces: without it, the project of civilisation is inconceivable, yet no part of life remains so untamed and undomesticated. Words and images can change minds, hearts, even the course of history. Their makers shape the stories people carry through their lives, unearth old ones and breathe them back to life, add new twists, point to unexpected endings. It is time to pick up the threads and make the stories new, as they must always be made new, starting from where we are. Mainstream art in the West has long been about shock; about busting taboos, about Getting Noticed. This has gone on for so long that it has become common to assert that in these ironic, exhausted, post-everything times, there are no taboos left to bust. But there is one. The last taboo is the myth of civilisation. It is built upon the stories we have constructed about our genius, our indestructibility, our manifest destiny as a chosen species. It is where our vision and our self-belief intertwine with our reckless refusal to face the reality of our position on this Earth. It has led the human race to achieve what it has achieved; and has led the planet into the age of ecocide. The two are intimately linked. We believe they must decoupled if anything is to remain. We believe that artists — which is to us the most welcoming of words, taking under its wing writers of all kinds, painters, musicians, sculptors, poets, designers, creators, makers of things, dreamers of dreams — have a responsibility to begin the process of decoupling. We believe that, in the age of ecocide, the last taboo must be broken — and that only artists can do it. Ecocide demands a response. That response is too important to be left to politicians, economists, conceptual thinkers, number crunchers; too all-pervasive to be left to activists or campaigners. Artists are needed. So far, though, the artistic response has been muted. In between traditional nature poetry and agitprop, what is there? Where are the poems that have adjusted their scope to the scale of this challenge? Where are the novels that probe beyond the country house or the city centre? What new form of writing has emerged to challenge civilisation itself? What gallery mounts an exhibition equal to this challenge? Which musician has discovered the secret chord? If the answers to these questions have been scarce up to now, it is perhaps both because the depth of collective denial is so great, and because the challenge is so very daunting. We are daunted by it, ourselves. But we believe it needs to be risen to. We believe that art must look over the edge, face the world that is coming with a steady eye, and rise to the challenge of ecocide with a challenge of its own: an artistic response to the crumbling of the empires of the mind. This response we call Uncivilised art, and we are interested in one branch of it in particular: Uncivilised writing. Uncivilised writing is writing which attempts to stand outside the human bubble and see us as we are: highly evolved apes with an array of talents and abilities which we are unleashing without sufficient thought, control, compassion or intelligence. Apes who have constructed a sophisticated myth of their own importance with which to sustain their civilising project. Apes whose project has been to tame, to control, to subdue or to destroy — to civilise the forests, the deserts, the wild lands and the seas, to impose bonds on the minds of their own in order that they might feel nothing when they exploit or destroy their fellow creatures. Against the civilising project, which has become the progenitor of ecocide, Uncivilised writing offers not a non-human perspective—we remain human and, even now, are not quite ashamed — but a perspective which sees us as one strand of a web rather than as the first palanquin in a glorious procession. It offers an unblinking look at the forces among which we find ourselves. It sets out to paint a picture of homo sapiens which a being from another world or, better, a being from our own — a blue whale, an albatross, a mountain hare — might recognise as something approaching a truth. It sets out to tug our attention away from ourselves and turn it outwards; to uncentre our minds. It is writing, in short, which puts civilisation — and us — into perspective. Writing that comes not, as most writing still does, from the self-absorbed and self-congratulatory metropolitan centres of civilisation but from somewhere on its wilder fringes. Somewhere woody and weedy and largely avoided, from where insistent, uncomfortable truths about ourselves drift in; truths which we’re not keen on hearing Writing which unflinchingly stares us down, however uncomfortable this may prove. It might perhaps be just as useful to explain what Uncivilised writing is not. It is not environmental writing, for there is much of that about already, and most of it fails to jump the barrier which marks the limit of our collective human ego; much of it, indeed, ends up shoring-up that ego, and helping us to persist in our civilisational delusions. It is not nature writing, for there is no such thing as nature as distinct from people, and to suggest otherwise is to perpetuate the attitude which has brought us here. And it is not political writing, with which the world is already flooded, for politics is a human confection, complicit in ecocide and decaying from within. Uncivilised writing is more rooted than any of these. Above all, it is determined to shift our worldview, not to feed into it. It is writing for outsiders. If you want to be loved, it might be best not to get involved, for the world, at least for a time, will resolutely refuse to listen.

Hence, as intellectuals we have an obligation to take a step back and examine the hubris of our civilization as well as the things we deem to be hegemonically true. Without such a critical examination of humanity’s worldview, all of our normative mindsets are epistemically suspect because they fail to consider a viewpoint other than the totalizing view of humanity.  There are multiple additional justifications for the framework:

A. Because the ballot gives the judge the power to determine what is endorsed as truthful in this round, the judge is implicitly assuming the role of the intellectual, which by definition means that their primary obligation is to reflect on and deconstruct truth.  Foucault explains,

It seems to me that what must now be taken into account in The intellectual is not the ‘bearer of universal values.’  Rather, it’s the person occupying a specific position – but whose specificity is linked, in a society like ours, to the general functioning of an apparatus of truth.  In other words, the intellectual has a three-fold specificity: that of his class position (whether as petty-bourgeois in the service of capitalism or ‘organic’ intellectual of the proletariat); that of his conditions of life and work, linked to his condition as an intellectual (his field of research, his place in a laboratory, and political and economy demands to which he submits of against which he rebels, in the university, the hospital, etc.); lastly, the specificity of the politics of truths in our societies. And it’s with this last factor that their his position can take on a general significance and that his local, specific struggle can have effects and implications which are not simply professional or sectorial.  The intellectual can operate and struggle at the general level of that regime of truth which is so essential to the structure and functioning of our society.  There is a battle ‘for truth,’ or at least ‘around truth’ – it being understood once again that by truth I do not mean ‘the ensemble of truths which are to be discovered and accepted,’ but rather ‘the ensemble of rules according to which the true and false are separated and specific effects of power attached to the true’, it being understood also that it’s not a matter of a battle ‘on behalf’ of the truth, but of a battle about the status of truth and the economic and political role it plays.  It is necessary to think of the political problems of intellectuals not in terms of ‘science’ and ‘ideology’, but in terms of ‘truth’ and ‘power’.  And thus the question of the professionalization of intellectuals and the division between intellectual and manual labour can be envisaged in a new way.  All this must seem very confused and uncertain.  Uncertain indeed, and what I am saying here is above all to be taken as a hypothesis. In order for it to be a little less confused, however, I would like to put forward a few ‘propositions’ – not firm assertions, but simply suggestions to be further tested and explained.  ‘Truth’ is to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation and operation of statements.  ‘Truth’ is linked in a circular relation with system of powers which produces and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it.  A regime of truth.  This regime is not merely ideological or superstructural; it was a condition of the formation and development of capitalism.  And it’s this same regime which is, subject to certain modifications, operates in the socialists countries (I leave open here the question of China, about which I know little).  The essential political problem for the intellectual is not to criticize the ideological contents supposedly linked to science, or to ensure that his own scientific practice is accompanied by a correct ideology, but that of ascertaining the possibility of constitution a new politics of truth.  The problem is not changing people’s consciousness’s – or what’s in their heads – but the political, economic, institutional regime of the production of truth.  It’s not a matter of emancipating truth from every system of power (which would be a chimera, for truth is already power) but of detaching the power of truth from the forms of hegemony, social economic and cultural, within which it operates at the present time.  

B. Engaging in a deconstructive thought is a pre-requisite to all other forms of thought because asymmetrical power relations corrupt the meaning of truth. Rather than act as a judgment, truth must combat judgment to have a cogent and valuable meaning.  Deleuze explains,

Combat is not a judgment of God, but the way to have done with God and with judgment.  No one develops through judgment, but through a combat that implies no judgment.  Existence and judgment seem to be opposed on five points: cruelty versus infinite torture, sleep or intoxication versus the dream, vitality versus organization, the will to power versus a will to dominate, combat versus war.  What disturbed us was that in renouncing judgment we had the impression of depriving ourselves of any means of distinguishing between existing beings, between modes of existence, as if everything were now of equal value.  But is it not rather Judgment that presupposes preexisting criteria (higher values), criteria that preexist for all time (to the infinity of time), so that it can neither apprehend what is new in an existing being, nor even sense the creation of a mode of existence?  Such a mode is created vitally, through combat, in the insomnia of sleep, and not without a certain cruelty toward itself: nothing of all this is the result of judgment.  Judgment prevents the emergence of any new modes of existence.  For the latter creates itself through its own forces, that is, through the forces it is able to harness, and is valid in and of itself inasmuch as it brings the new combination into existence.  Herein, perhaps, lies the secret: to bring into existence and not to judge.  If it so disgusting to judge, it is not because everything is of equal value, but on the contrary because what has value can be made or distinguished only by defying judgment.  What expert judgment, in art, could ever bear on the work to come?  It is not a question of judging other existing beings, but of sensing whether they agree or disagree with us, that is, whether they bring forces to us, or whether they return us to the miseries of war, to the poverty of thee dream, to the rigors of organization.  As Spinoza had said, it is a problem of love  and hate and not judgment; “my soul and body are one...What my soul loves, I love.  What my soul hates, I hate...All the subtle sympathizing’s of the incalculable soul, from the bitterest that to passionate love.”  This is not subjectivism, since to pose the problem in terms of force, and not in other terms, already surpasses all subjectivity.    

There are multiple implications. First, any system that allows for oppression is epistemically flawed because it is only when we defy judgments of others in our thought by deconstructing dominating truths that our thought gains true meaning – this means reducing oppression comes first under any framework. Second, Deleuze is a critique of theory and topicality because any attempt to restrict my creative expression is a form of bankrupt thought.   

C. Deconstructing truths by rejecting anthropocentrism is a pre-requisite to other frameworks because other forms of knowledge production are key – it’s an epistemic priority.  Das explains,

Parallax describes the apparent change in the direction of a moving object caused by alteration in the observer's position. In the graphic work of M.C. Escher, human faculties are similarly deceived and an impossible reality made plausible. While not strictly a scientific theorem, anthropocentrism, the assessment of reality through an exclusively human perspective, is deeply embedded in science and culture. Improving knowledge requires abandoning anthropocentricity or, at least, acknowledging its existence. Anthropocentrism's limits derive from the physical constraints of human cognition and specific psychological attitudes. Being human entails specific faculties, intrinsic attitudes, values and belief systems that shape enquiry and understanding. The human mind has evolved a specific physical structure and bio-chemistry that shapes thought processes. The human cognitive system determines our reasoning and therefore our knowledge. Language, logic, mathematics, abstract thought, cultural beliefs, history and memories create a specific human frame of reference, which may restrict what we can know or understand. There may be other forms of life and intelligence. The ocean has revealed creatures that live from chemo-synthesis in ecosystems around deep-sea hydrothermal vents, without access to sunlight. Life forms based on materials other than carbon may also be feasible. An entirely radical set of cognitive frameworks and alternative knowledge cannot be discounted. Like a train that can only run on tracks that determine direction and destination, human knowledge may ultimately be constrained by what evolution has made us. Knowledge was originally driven by the need to master the natural environment to meet basic biological needs—survival and genetic propagation. It was also needed to deal with the unknown and forces beyond human control. Superstition, religion, science and other belief systems evolved to meets these human needs. In the eighteenth century, medieval systems of aristocratic and religious authority were supplanted by a new model of scientific method, rational discourse, personal liberty and individual responsibility. But this did not change the basic underlying drivers. Knowledge is also influenced by human factors—fear and greed, ambition, submission and tribal collusion, altruism and jealousy, as well as complex power relationships and inter-personal group dynamics. Behavioural science illustrates the inherent biases in human thought. Announcing a boycott of certain "luxury" scientific journals, 2013 Nobel laureate Dr. Randy Schekman argued that to preserve their pre-eminence they acted like "fashion designers who create limited-edition handbags or suits…knowing scarcity stokes demand". He argued that science is being distorted by perverse incentives whereby scientists who publish in important journals with a high "impact factor" can expect promotion, pay rises and professional accolades. Understanding operates within these biological and attitudinal constraints. As Friedrich Nietzsche wrote: "every philosophy hides a philosophy; every opinion is also a hiding place, every word is a mask". Understanding of fundamental issues remains limited. The cosmological nature and origins of the universe are contested. The physical source and nature of matter and energy are debated. The origins and evolution of biological life remain unresolved. Resistance to new ideas frequently restricts the development of knowledge. The history of science is a succession of controversies—a non geo-centric universe, continental drift, theory of evolution, quantum mechanics and climate change. Science, paradoxically, seems to also have inbuilt limits. Like an inexhaustible Russian doll, quantum physics is an endless succession of seemingly infinitely divisible particles. Werner Heisenberg's uncertainty principle posits that human knowledge about the world is always incomplete, uncertain and highly contingent. Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorems of mathematical logic establish inherent limitations of all but the most trivial axiomatic systems of arithmetic. Experimental methodology and testing is flawed. Model predictions are often unsatisfactory. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb observed: "You can disguise charlatanism under the weight of equations … there is no such thing as a controlled experiment." Challenging anthropocentrism does not mean abandoning science or rational thought. It does not mean reversion to primitive religious dogma, messianic phantasms or obscure mysticism. Transcending anthropocentricity may allow new frames of reference expanding the boundary of human knowledge. It may allow human beings to think more clearly, consider different perspectives and encourage possibilities outside the normal range of experience and thought. It may also allow a greater understanding of our existential place within nature and in the order of things. As William Shakespeare's Hamlet cautioned a friend: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy". But fundamental biology may not allow the required change of reference framework. While periodically humbled by the universe, human beings remain enamoured, for the most part, with the proposition that they are the apogee of development. But as Mark Twain observed in Letters from Earth: "He took a pride in man; man was his finest invention; man was his pet, after the housefly." Writing in The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy, the late English author Douglas Adams speculated that the earth was a powerful computer and human beings were its biological components designed by hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings to answer the ultimate questions about the universe and life. To date, science has not produced a conclusive refutation of this whimsical proposition. Whether or not we can go beyond anthropocentrism, it is a reminder of our limits. As Martin Rees, Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics, at Cambridge and Astronomer Royal, noted:  "Most educated people are aware that we are the outcome of nearly 4 billion years of Darwinian selection, but many tend to think that humans are somehow the culmination. Our sun, however, is less than halfway through its lifespan. It will not be humans who watch the sun's demise, 6 billion years from now. Any creatures that then exist will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoebae."  

Epistemology comes prior to other normative foundations because all other functions are merely a function of our knowledge.  We need to understand how we know the distinction between right and wrong before we pick the best definition – without a cogent epistemology all-normative thought is corrupted.  Thus, I affirm.

Tournament: ToC | Round: 6 | Opponent: Cypress Woods XX | Judge: Ben Koh
PART ONE IS MYTH OF CIVILIZATION.

Modern society has built organized cities, created complex economic systems, and invented advanced destructive technology all premised on an anthropocentric myth of progress.  Our planet is dying; the engines that power our civilization are stuttering, yet, we continuously deny that we now live in an age of ecocide.  Our attempts at a utopian world have miserably failed and over a century of hubris have resulted in a reckless and dangerous transcendence from nature.  Kingsworth and Hine explain,

Those who witness extreme social collapse at first hand seldom describe any deep revelation about the truths of human existence. What they do mention, if asked, is their surprise at how easy it is to die. The pattern of ordinary life, in which so much stays the same from one day to the next, disguises the fragility of its fabric. How many of our activities are made possible by the impression of stability that pattern gives? So long as it repeats, or varies steadily enough, we are able to plan for tomorrow as if all the things we rely on and don’t think about too care- fully will still be there. When the pattern is broken, by civil war or natural disaster or the smaller-scale tragedies that tear at its fabric, many of those activities become impossible or meaningless, while simply meeting needs we once took for granted may occupy much of our lives. What war correspondents and relief workers report is not only the fragility of the fabric, but the speed with which it can unravel. As we write this, no one can say with certainty where the unravelling of the financial and commercial fabric of our economies will end. Meanwhile, Beyond the cities, unchecked industrial exploitation frays the material basis of life in many parts of the world, and pulls at the ecological systems which sustain it. Precarious as this moment may be, however, an awareness of the fragility of what we call civilisation is nothing new. ‘Few men realise,’ wrote Joseph Conrad in 1896, ‘that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings.’ Conrad’s writings exposed the civilisation exported by European imperialists to be little more than a comforting illusion, not only in the dark, unconquerable heart of Africa, but in the whited sepulchres of their capital cities. The inhabitants of that civilisation believed ‘blindly in the irresistible force of its institutions and its morals, in the power of its police and of its opinion,’ but their confidence could be maintained only by the seeming solidity of the crowd of like-minded believers surrounding them. Outside the walls, the wild remained as close to the surface as blood under skin, though the city-dweller was no longer equipped to face it directly. Bertrand Russell caught this vein in Conrad’s worldview, suggesting that the novelist ‘thought of civilised and morally tolerable human life as a dangerous walk on a thin crust of barely cooled lava which at any moment might break and let the unwary sink into fiery depths.’ What both Russell and Conrad were getting at was a simple fact which any historian could confirm: Human civilisation is an intensely fragile construction. It is built on little more than belief: belief in the rightness of its values; belief in the strength of its system of law and order; belief in its currency; above all, perhaps, belief in its future. Once that belief begins to crumble, the collapse of a civilisation may become unstoppable. That civilisations fall, sooner or later, is as much a law of history as gravity is a law of physics. What remains are after the fall is a wild mixture of cultural debris, confused and angry people whose certainties have betrayed them, and those forces which were always there, deeper than the foundations of the city walls: the desire to survive and the desire for meaning. It is, it seems, our civilisation’s turn to experience the inrush of the savage and the unseen; our turn to be brought up short by contact with untamed reality. There is a fall coming. We live in an age in which familiar restraints are being kicked away, and foundations snatched from under us. After a quarter century of complacency, in which we were invited to believe in bubbles that would never burst, prices that would never fall, the end of history, the crude repackaging of the triumphalism of Conrad’s Victorian twilight — Hubris has been introduced to Nemesis. Now a familiar human story is being played out. It is the story of an empire corroding from within. It is the story of a people who believed, for a long time, that their actions did not have consequences. It is the story of how that people will cope with the crumbling of their own myth. It is our story. This time, the crumbling empire is the unassailable global economy, and the brave new world of consumer democracy being forged worldwide in its name. Upon the indestructibility of this edifice we have pinned the hopes of this latest phase of our civilisation. Now, its failure and fallibility exposed, the world’s elites are scrabbling frantically to buoy up an economic machine which, for decades, they told us needed little restraint, for restraint would be its undoing. Uncountable sums of money are being funnelled upwards in order to prevent an uncontrolled explosion. The machine is stuttering and the engineers are in panic. They are wondering if perhaps they do not understand it as well as they imagined. They are wondering whether they are controlling it at all or whether, perhaps, it is controlling them. Increasingly, people are restless. The engineers group themselves into competing teams, but neither side seems to know what to do, and neither seems much different from the other. Around the world, discontent can be heard. The extremists are grinding their knives and moving in as the machine’s coughing and stuttering exposes the inadequacies of the political oligarchies who claimed to have everything in hand. Old gods are rearing their heads, and old answers: revolution, war, ethnic strife. Politics as we have known it totters, like the machine it was built to sustain. In its place could easily arise something more elemental, with a dark heart. As the financial wizards lose their powers of levitation, as the politicians and economists struggle to conjure new explanations, it starts to dawn on us that behind the curtain, at the heart of the Emerald City, sits not the benign and omnipotent invisible hand we had been promised, but something else entirely. Something responsible for what Marx, writing not so long before Conrad, cast as the ‘everlasting uncertainty and anguish’ of the ‘bourgeois epoch’; a time in which ‘all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.’ Draw back the curtain, follow the tireless motion of cogs and wheels back to its source, and you will find the engine driving our civilisation: the myth of progress. The myth of progress is to us what the myth of god-given warrior prowess was to the Romans, or the myth of eternal salvation was to the conquistadors: without it, our efforts cannot be sustained. Onto the root stock of Western Christianity, the Enlightenment at its most optimistic grafted a vision of an Earthly paradise, towards which human effort guided by calculative reason could take us. Following this guidance, each generation will live a better life than the life of those that went before it. History becomes an escalator, and the only way is up. On the top floor is human perfection. It is important that this should remain just out of reach in order to sustain the sensation of motion. Recent history, however, has given this mechanism something of a battering. The past century too often threatened a descent into hell, rather than the promised heaven on Earth. Even within the prosperous and liberal societies of the West progress has, in many ways, failed to deliver the goods. Today’s generation are demonstrably less content, and consequently less optimistic, than those that went before. They work longer hours, with less security, and less chance of leaving behind the social back- ground into which they were born. They fear crime, social breakdown, overdevelopment, environmental collapse. They do not believe that the future will be better than the past. Individually, they are less constrained by class and convention than their parents or grandparents, but more constrained by law, surveillance, state proscription and personal debt. Their physical health is better, their mental health more fragile. Nobody knows what is coming. Nobody wants to look. Most significantly of all, there is an underlying darkness at the root of everything we have built. Outside the cities, beyond the blurring edges of our civilisation, at the mercy of the machine but not under its control, lies something that neither Marx nor Conrad, Caesar nor Hume, Thatcher nor Lenin ever really understood. Something that Western civilisation — which has set the terms for global civilisation—was never capable of understanding, because to understand it would be to undermine, fatally, the myth of that civilisation. Something upon which that thin crust of lava is balanced; which feeds the machine and all the people who run it, and which they have all trained themselves not to see.  The myth of progress is founded on the myth of nature. The first tells us that we are destined for greatness; the second tells us that greatness is cost-free. Each is intimately bound up with the other. Both tell us that we are apart from the world; that we began grunting in the primeval swamps, as a humble part of something called ‘nature’, which we have now triumphantly subdued. The very fact that we have a word for ‘nature’ is 5 evidence that we do not regard ourselves as part of it. Indeed, our separation from it is a myth integral to the triumph of our civilisation. We are, we tell ourselves, the only species ever to have attacked nature and won. In this, our unique glory is contained. Outside the citadels of self-congratulation, lone voices have cried out against this infantile version of the human story for centuries, But it is only in the last few decades that its inaccuracy has become laughably apparent. We are the first generations to grow up surrounded by evidence that our attempt to separate ourselves from ‘nature’ has been a grim failure, proof not of our genius but our hubris. The attempt to sever the hand from the body has endangered the ‘progress’ we hold so dear, and it has endangered much of ‘nature’ too. The resulting upheaval underlies the crisis we now face. We imagined ourselves isolated from the source of our existence. The fallout from this imaginative error is all around us: a quarter of the world’s mammals are threatened with imminent extinction; an acre and a half of rainforest is felled every second; 75 of the world’s fish stocks are on the verge of collapse; humanity consumes 25 more of the world’s natural ‘products’ than the Earth can replace — a figure predicted to rise to 80 by mid-century. Even through the deadening lens of statistics, we can glimpse the violence to which our myths have driven us. And over it all looms runaway climate change. Climate change, which threatens to render all human projects irrelevant; which presents us with detailed evidence of our lack of understanding of the world we inhabit while, at the same time, demonstrating that we are still entirely reliant upon it.  Climate change, which highlights in painful colour the head-on crash between civilisation and ‘nature’; which makes plain, more effectively than any carefully constructed argument or optimistically defiant protest, how the machine’s need for permanent growth will require us to destroy ourselves in its name. Climate change, which brings home at last our ultimate powerlessness. These are the facts, or some of them. Yet facts never tell the whole story. (‘Facts’, Conrad wrote, in Lord Jim, ‘as if facts could prove anything.’) The facts of environmental crisis we hear so much about often conceal as much as they expose. We hear daily about the impacts of our activities on ‘the environment’ (like ‘nature’, this is an expression which distances us from the reality of our situation). Daily we hear, too, of the many ‘solutions’ to these problems: solutions which usually involve the necessity of urgent political agreement and a judicious application of human technological genius. Things may be changing, runs the narrative, but there is nothing we cannot deal with here, folks. We perhaps need to move faster, more urgently. Certainly we need to accelerate the pace of research and development. We accept that we must become more ‘sustainable’. But everything will be fine. There will still be growth, there will still be progress: these things will continue, because they have to continue, so they cannot do anything but continue. There is nothing to see here. Everything will be fine. We do not believe that everything will be fine. We are not even sure, based on current definitions of progress and improvement, that we want it to be. Of all humanity’s delusions of difference, of its separation from and superiority to the living world which surrounds it, one distinction holds up better than most: we may well be the first species capable of effectively eliminating life on Earth. This is a hypothesis we seem intent on putting to the test. We are already responsible for denuding the world of much of its richness, magnificence, beauty, colour and magic, and we show no sign of slowing down. For a very long time, we imagined that ‘nature’ was something that happened elsewhere. The damage we did to it might be regrettable, but needed to be weighed against the benefits here and now. And in the worst case scenario, there would always be some kind of Plan B. Perhaps we would make for the moon, where we could survive in lunar colonies under giant bubbles as we planned our expansion across the galaxy. But there is no Plan B and the bubble, it turns out, is where we have been living all the while. The bubble is that delusion of isolation under which we have laboured for so long. The bubble has cut us off from life on the only planet we have, or are ever likely to have. The bubble is civilisation. Consider the structures on which that bubble has been built. Its foundations are geological: coal, oil, gas — millions upon millions of years of ancient sunlight, dragged from the depths of the planet and burned with abandon. On this base, the structure stands. Move upwards, and you pass through a jumble of supporting horrors: battery chicken sheds; industrial abattoirs; burning forests; beam-trawled ocean floors; dynamited reefs; hollowed-out mountains; wasted soil. Finally, on top of all these unseen layers, you reach the well-tended surface where you and I stand: unaware, or uninterested, in what goes on beneath us; demanding that the authorities keep us in the manner to which we have been accustomed; occasion- ally feeling twinges of guilt that lead us to buy organic chickens or locally-produced lettuces; yet for the most part glutted, but not sated, on the fruits of the horrors on which our lifestyles depend. We are the first generations born into a new and unprecedented age — the age of ecocide. To name it thus is not to presume the outcome, but simply to describe a process which is underway. The ground, the sea, the air, the elemental backdrops to our existence — all these our economics has taken for granted, to be used as a bottomless tip, endlessly able to dilute and disperse the tailings of our extraction, production, consumption.

Despite the attempts of the engineers to fix the machines of civilization through half-hearted measures of sustainability, and political reform, we are nevertheless headed for catastrophe. Our solutions to regulate extractive industries and consumption are merely a façade created by the ruling class to preserve their power and don’t actually address the anthropocentric mindset behind the “myth of progress.” 

The myth of progress has secretly and silently produced our thoughts, and actions; it has crept into and slowly taken over our epistemology; it has dominated our politics and our ethics.  Our leaders have made us forget that our stories are merely stories and that only we can undermine the myths of our civilization.  Kingsworth and Hine 2 explain,

If we are indeed teetering on the edge of a massive change in how we live, in how human society itself is constructed, and in how we relate to the rest of the world, then we were led to this point by the Stories we have told ourselves — above all, by the story of civilisation. This story has many variants, religious and secular, scientific, economic and mystic. But all tell of humanity’s original transcendence of its animal beginnings, our growing mastery over a ‘nature’ to which we no longer belong, and the glorious future of plenty and prosperity which will follow when this mastery is complete. It is the story of human centrality, of a species destined to be lord of all it surveys, unconfined by the limits that apply to other, lesser creatures. What makes this story so dangerous is that, for the most part, we have forgotten that it is a story. It has been told so many times by those who see themselves as rationalists, even scientists; heirs to the Enlightenment’s legacy — a legacy which includes the denial of the role of stories in making the world. Humans have always lived by stories, and those with skill in telling them have been treated with respect and, often, a certain wariness. Beyond the limits of reason, reality remains mysterious, as incapable of being approached directly as a hunter’s quarry. With stories, with art, with symbols and layers of meaning, we stalk those elusive aspects of reality that go undreamed of in our philosophy. The storyteller weaves the mysterious into the fabric of life, lacing it with the comic, the tragic, the obscene, making safe paths through dangerous territory. Yet as the myth of civilisation deepened its grip on our thinking, borrowing the guise of science and reason, we began to deny the role of stories, to dismiss their power as something primitive, childish, outgrown. The old tales by which generations had made sense of life’s subtleties and strangenesses were bowdlerised and packed off to the nursery. Religion, that bag of myths and mysteries, birthplace of the theatre, was straightened out into a framework of universal laws and moral account-keeping. The dream visions of the Middle Ages became the nonsense stories of Victorian childhood. In the age of the novel, stories were no longer the way to approach the deep truths of the world, so much as a way to pass time on a train journey. It is hard, today, to imagine that the word of a poet was once feared by a king. Yet for all this, our world is still shaped by stories. Through television, film, novels and video games, we may be more thoroughly bombarded with narrative material than any people that ever lived. What is peculiar, however, is the carelessness with which these stories are channelled at us — as entertainment, a distraction from daily life, something to hold our attention to the other side of the ad break. There is little sense that these things make up the equipment by which we navigate reality. On the other hand, there are the serious stories told by economists, politicians, geneticists and corporate leaders. These are not presented as stories at all, but as direct accounts of how the world is. Choose between competing versions, then fight with those who chose differently. The ensuing conflicts play out on early morning radio, in afternoon debates and late night television pundit wars. And yet, for all the noise, what is striking is how much the opposing sides agree on: all their stories are only variants of the larger story of human centrality, of our ever-expanding control over ‘nature’, our right to perpetual economic growth, our ability to transcend all limits. So we find ourselves, our ways of telling unbalanced, trapped inside a runaway narrative, headed for the worst kind of encounter with reality. In such a moment, writers, artists, poets and storytellers of all kinds have a critical role to play. Creativity remains the most uncontrollable of human forces: without it, the project of civilisation is inconceivable, yet no part of life remains so untamed and undomesticated. Words and images can change minds, hearts, even the course of history. Their makers shape the stories people carry through their lives, unearth old ones and breathe them back to life, add new twists, point to unexpected endings. It is time to pick up the threads and make the stories new, as they must always be made new, starting from where we are. Mainstream art in the West has long been about shock; about busting taboos, about Getting Noticed. This has gone on for so long that it has become common to assert that in these ironic, exhausted, post-everything times, there are no taboos left to bust. But there is one. The last taboo is the myth of civilisation. It is built upon the stories we have constructed about our genius, our indestructibility, our manifest destiny as a chosen species. It is where our vision and our self-belief intertwine with our reckless refusal to face the reality of our position on this Earth. It has led the human race to achieve what it has achieved; and has led the planet into the age of ecocide. The two are intimately linked. We believe they must decoupled if anything is to remain. We believe that artists — which is to us the most welcoming of words, taking under its wing writers of all kinds, painters, musicians, sculptors, poets, designers, creators, makers of things, dreamers of dreams — have a responsibility to begin the process of decoupling. We believe that, in the age of ecocide, the last taboo must be broken — and that only artists can do it. Ecocide demands a response .

The anthropocentric myth of progress is the original and foundational hierarchy that structures all other forms of oppression. The totalizing and oppressive domestication of the human began with the domination of the animal.  The anthropocentric mindset of the myth of progress is the controlling impact of all domination because the subjugation of the human is based on the flawed belief that it is permissible to oppress that is considered “nonhuman.”  Best explain,

Hierarchy emerged when with the rise of agricultural society some ten thousand years ago. In the shift from nomadic hunting and gathering bands to settled agricultural practices, humans began to establish their dominance over animals through “domestication.” In animal domestication (often a euphemism disguising coercion and cruelty), humans began to exploit animals for purposes such as obtaining food, milk, clothing, plowing, and transportation. As they gained increasing control over the lives and labor power of animals, humans bred them for desired traits and controlled them in various ways, such as castrating males to make them more docile. To conquer, enslave, and claim animals as their own property, humans developed numerous technologies, such as pens, cages, collars, ropes, chains, and branding irons. The domination of animals paved the way for the domination of humans. The sexual subjugation of women, Patterson suggests, was modeled after the domestication of animals, such that men began to control women’s reproductive capacity, to enforce repressive sexual norms, and to rape them as they forced breeding in their animals. Not coincidentally, Patterson argues, slavery emerged in the same region of the Middle East that spawned agriculture, and, in fact, developed as an extension of animal domestication practices. In areas like Sumer, slaves were managed like livestock, and males were castrated and forced to work along with females. In the fifteenth century, when Europeans began the colonization of Africa and Spain introduced the first international slave markets, the metaphors, models, and technologies used to exploit animals slaves were applied with equal cruelty and force to human slaves. Stealing Africans from their native environment and homeland, breaking up families who scream in anguish, wrapping chains around slaves’ bodies, shipping them in cramped quarters across continents for weeks or months with no regard for their needs or suffering, branding their skin with a hot iron to mark them as property, auctioning them as servants, breeding them for service and labor, exploiting them for profit, beating them in rages of hatred and anger, and killing them in vast numbers – all these horrors and countless others inflicted on black slaves were developed and perfected centuries earlier through animal exploitation. As the domestication of animals developed in agricultural society, humans lost the intimate connections they once had with animals. By the time of Aristotle, certainly, and with the bigoted assistance of medieval theologians such as St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, western humanity had developed an explicitly hierarchical worldview – that came to be known as the “Great Chain of Being” – used to position humans as the end to which all other beings were mere means.  Patterson underscores the crucial point that the domination of human over human and its exercise through slavery, warfare, and genocide typically begins with the denigration of victims. 

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The alternative is to engage in the process of uncivilized writing, a process by which each person demarcates himself or herself from civilization and the binaries of human-nonhuman by recognizing humanity for exactly what it is: a group of apes who had the hubris to think that their actions did not have any consequences; to have the audacity to believe that we are a superior form of life.  The process of uncivilized writing is writing from the outside. It is only through the process of uncivilized writing that we can BURN civilization to the ground by undermining the myth of progress.  Kingsworth and Hine 3 explain,

That response is too important to be left to politicians, economists, conceptual thinkers, number crunchers; too all-pervasive to be left to activists or campaigners. Artists are needed. So far, though, the artistic response has been muted. In between traditional nature poetry and agitprop, what is there? Where are the poems that have adjusted their scope to the scale of this challenge? Where are the novels that probe beyond the country house or the city centre? What new form of writing has emerged to challenge civilisation itself? What gallery mounts an exhibition equal to this challenge? Which musician has discovered the secret chord? If the answers to these questions have been scarce up to now, it is perhaps both because the depth of collective denial is so great, and because the challenge is so very daunting. We are daunted by it, ourselves. But we believe it needs to be risen to. We believe that art must look over the edge, face the world that is coming with a steady eye, and rise to the challenge of ecocide with a challenge of its own: an artistic response to the crumbling of the empires of the mind. This The response is we call Uncivilised art, and we are interested in one branch of it in particular: Uncivilised writing. Uncivilised writing is writing which attempts to stand outside the human bubble and see us as we are: highly evolved apes with an array of talents and abilities which we are unleashing without sufficient thought, control, compassion or intelligence. Apes who have constructed a sophisticated myth of their own importance with which to sustain their civilising project. Apes whose project has been to tame, to control, to subdue or to destroy and — to civilise the forests, the deserts, the wild lands and the seas, to impose bonds on the minds of their own so in order that they might feel nothing when they exploit or destroy their fellow creatures. Against the civilising project, which has become the progenitor of ecocide,  Uncivilised writing offers not a non-human perspective—we remain human and, even now, are not quite ashamed — but a perspective which sees us as one strand of a web rather than as the first palanquin in a glorious procession. It offers an unblinking look at the forces among which we find ourselves. It sets out to paint a picture of homo sapiens which a being from another world or, better, a being from our own — a blue whale, an albatross, a mountain hare — might recognise as something approaching a truth. It sets out to tug our attention away from ourselves and turn it outwards; to uncentre our minds. It is writing, in short, which puts civilisation — and us — into perspective. Writing that comes not, as most writing still does, from the self-absorbed and self-congratulatory metropolitan centres of civilisation but from somewhere on its wilder fringes. Somewhere woody and weedy and largely avoided, from where insistent, uncomfortable truths about ourselves drift in; truths which we’re not keen on hearing Writing which unflinchingly stares us down, however uncomfortable this may prove. It might perhaps be just as useful to explain what Uncivilised writing is not. It is not environmental writing, for there is much of that about already, and most of it fails to jump the barrier which marks the limit of our collective human ego; much of it, indeed, ends up shoring-up that ego, and helping us to persist in our civilisational delusions. It is not nature writing, for there is no such thing as nature as distinct from people, and to suggest otherwise is to perpetuate the attitude which has brought us here. And it is not political writing, with which the world is already flooded, for politics is a human confection, complicit in ecocide and decaying from within. Uncivilised writing is more rooted than any of these. Above all, it is determined to shift our worldview, not to feed into it. It is writing for outsiders. If you want to be loved, it might be best not to get involved, for the world, at least for a time, will resolutely refuse to listen.

PART TWO IS FRAMEWORK

Unless we completely rupture civilization by burning the factories that destroy our environment to the ground, the anthropocentric mindset will continue to blur our judgment and plague our thought.  This requires a change in the way the judge evaluates the round.  The judge now must act as the uncivilized writer that deconstructs truth and revealing the myth of our civilization.  Ivory tower and abstract philosophical theorizing is bankrupt since it willfully separates debaters from the real world, rendering itself completely obsolete.  It allows debaters to fiat utopian solutions to problems WITHOUT forcing them to engage with the mindsets that cause the problems in the first place.  The ballot has the ability to endorse what is considered truthful in this round by virtue of picking a winner.  Because of this, the judge must assume the role of the intellectual, which has the primary obligation to deconstruct the myths that serve as the lynchpin to our civilization.  Foucault explains,

It seems to me that what must now be taken into account in The intellectual is not the ‘bearer of universal values.’  Rather, it’s the person occupying a specific position – but whose specificity is linked, in a society like ours, to the general functioning of an apparatus of truth.  In other words, the intellectual has a three-fold specificity: that of his class position (whether as petty-bourgeois in the service of capitalism or ‘organic’ intellectual of the proletariat); that of his conditions of life and work, linked to his condition as an intellectual (his field of research, his place in a laboratory, and political and economy demands to which he submits of against which he rebels, in the university, the hospital, etc.); lastly, the specificity of the politics of truths in our societies. And it’s with this last factor that their his position can take on a general significance and that his local, specific struggle can have effects and implications which are not simply professional or sectorial.  The intellectual can operate and struggle at the general level of that regime of truth which is so essential to the structure and functioning of our society.  There is a battle ‘for truth,’ or at least ‘around truth’ – it being understood once again that by truth I do not mean ‘the ensemble of truths which are to be discovered and accepted,’ but rather ‘the ensemble of rules according to which the true and false are separated and specific effects of power attached to the true’, it being understood also that it’s not a matter of a battle ‘on behalf’ of the truth, but of a battle about the status of truth and the economic and political role it plays.  It is necessary to think of the political problems of intellectuals not in terms of ‘science’ and ‘ideology’, but in terms of ‘truth’ and ‘power’.  And thus the question of the professionalization of intellectuals and the division between intellectual and manual labour can be envisaged in a new way.  All this must seem very confused and uncertain.  Uncertain indeed, and what I am saying here is above all to be taken as a hypothesis. In order for it to be a little less confused, however, I would like to put forward a few ‘propositions’ – not firm assertions, but simply suggestions to be further tested and explained.  ‘Truth’ is to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation and operation of statements.  ‘Truth’ is linked in a circular relation with system of powers which produces and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it.  A regime of truth.  This regime is not merely ideological or superstructural; it was a condition of the formation and development of capitalism.  And it’s this same regime which is, subject to certain modifications, operates in the socialists countries (I leave open here the question of China, about which I know little).  The essential political problem for the intellectual is not to criticize the ideological contents supposedly linked to science, or to ensure that his own scientific practice is accompanied by a correct ideology, but that of ascertaining the possibility of constitution a new politics of truth.  The problem is not changing people’s consciousness’s – or what’s in their heads – but the political, economic, institutional regime of the production of truth.  It’s not a matter of emancipating truth from every system of power (which would be a chimera, for truth is already power) but of detaching the power of truth from the forms of hegemony, social economic and cultural, within which it operates at the present time.  

Engaging in this deconstructive thought is a pre-requisite to ALL other forms of thought because self-righteous truths prevent us from distinguishing value, thereby corrupting the meaning of truth.  If truth is to have any meaning, and our discourse is to have significance the judge must use the ballot to combat judgments.  Deleuze explains,

Combat is not a judgment of God, but the way to have done with God and with judgment.  No one develops through judgment, but through a combat that implies no judgment.  Existence and judgment seem to be opposed on five points: cruelty versus infinite torture, sleep or intoxication versus the dream, vitality versus organization, the will to power versus a will to dominate, combat versus war.  What disturbed us was that in renouncing judgment we had the impression of depriving ourselves of any means of distinguishing between existing beings, between modes of existence, as if everything were now of equal value.  But is it not rather Judgment that presupposes preexisting criteria (higher values), criteria that preexist for all time (to the infinity of time), so that it can neither apprehend what is new in an existing being, nor even sense the creation of a mode of existence?  Such a mode is created vitally, through combat, in the insomnia of sleep, and not without a certain cruelty toward itself: nothing of all this is the result of judgment.  Judgment prevents the emergence of any new modes of existence.  For the latter creates itself through its own forces, that is, through the forces it is able to harness, and is valid in and of itself inasmuch as it brings the new combination into existence.  Herein, perhaps, lies the secret: to bring into existence and not to judge.  If it so disgusting to judge, it is not because everything is of equal value, but on the contrary because what has value can be made or distinguished only by defying judgment.  What expert judgment, in art, could ever bear on the work to come?  It is not a question of judging other existing beings, but of sensing whether they agree or disagree with us, that is, whether they bring forces to us, or whether they return us to the miseries of war, to the poverty of thee dream, to the rigors of organization.  As Spinoza had said, it is a problem of love  and hate and not judgment; “my soul and body are one...What my soul loves, I love.  What my soul hates, I hate...All the subtle sympathizing’s of the incalculable soul, from the bitterest that to passionate love.”  This is not subjectivism, since to pose the problem in terms of force, and not in other terms, already surpasses all subjectivity.    

The criticism is a disad to theory.  Theory is an example of the academic procedural dogma that inhibits creative thinking and unique problem-solving strategies. Engaging debate on debate’s terms to weed out arguments that challenge its assumptions feeds into an ever-growing system of censorship that controls who is allowed to access certain knowledge – this means the aff’s deconstruction of truth outweighs fairness because it militarizes the debate space and prevents fluid thought.  Bleiker explains,

Bleiker 2000 Roland, Senior Lecturer at the University of Queensland, Popular Dissent, Human Agency, and Global Politics, pgs 18-19 Gazing beyond the boundaries of disciplinary knowledge is necessary to open up questions of traversal dissent and human agency. Academic disciplines, by virtue of what they are, discipline the production and diffusion of knowledge. They establish the rules of intellectual exchange and define the methods, techniques, and instruments that are considered proper for this purpose. Such conventions not only suggest on what ground things can be studied legitimately, but also decide what issues are worthwhile to be assessed in the first place. Thus, as soon as one addresses academic disciplines on their own terms, one has to play according to the rules of a discursive “police” which is reactivated each time one speaks. In this case, One cuts off any innovative thinking spaces that exist on the other side of this margin.

Thus, promoting my forms of critical education are key; promoting fairness to exclude arguments that attempt to change the mindsets that underpin our civilization are the very same totalitarian censorship tools used in the real world.  Thus, I affirm.