Bizarre Accusations

Imagine that you planned a long hike through a remote area, and suggested that it might help to have an experienced hunter-gather along as a guide. Should listeners presume that you intend to imprison and enslave such guides to serve you? Or is it more plausible that you propose to hire such people as guides?

To me, hiring seems the obvious interpretation. But, to accuse me of advancing a racist slavery agenda, Audra Mitchell and Aadita Chaudhury make the opposite interpretation in their 2020 International Relations article “Worlding beyond ‘the’ ‘end’ of ‘the world’: white apocalyptic visions and BIPOC futurisms”.

In a chapter “Catastrophe, Social Collapse, and Human Extinction” in the 2008 book Global Catastrophic Risks I suggested that we might protect against human extinction by populating underground refuges with people skilled at surviving in a world without civilization:

A very small human population would mostly have to retrace the growth path of our human ancestors; one hundred people cannot support an industrial society today, and perhaps not even a farming society. They might have to start with hunting and gathering, until they could reach a scale where simple farming was feasible. And only when their farming population was large and dense enough could they consider returning to industry.

So it might make sense to stock a refuge with real hunter-gatherers and subsistence farmers, together with the tools they find useful. Of course such people would need to be disciplined enough to wait peacefully in the refuge until the time to emerge was right. Perhaps such people could be rotated periodically from a well protected region where they practiced simple lifestyles, so they could keep their skills fresh. And perhaps we should test our refuge concepts, isolating real people near them for long periods to see how well particular sorts of refuges actually perform at returning their inhabitants to a simple sustainable lifestyle.

On this basis, Mitchell and Chaudhury call me a “white futurist” and “American settler economist” seeking to preserve existing Euro-centric power structures:

Indeed, many contributors to ‘end of the world’ discourses offer strategies for the reconstruction and ‘improvement’ of existing power structures after a global catastrophe. For example, American settler economist Robin Hanson calculates that if 100 humans survived a global catastrophic disaster that killed all others, they could eventually move back through the ‘stages’ of ‘human’ development, returning to the ‘hunter-gatherer stage’ within 20,000 years and then ‘progressing’ from there to a condition equivalent to contemporary society (defined in Euro-centric terms). …

some white futurists express concerns about the ‘de-volution’ of ‘humanity’ from its perceived pinnacle in Euro-centric societies. For example, American settler economist Hanson describes the emergence of ‘humanity’ in terms of four ‘progressions’

And solely on the basis of my book chapter quote above, Mitchell and Chaudhury bizarrely claim that I “quite literally” suggest imprisoning and enslaving people of color “to enable the future re-generation of whiteness”:

To achieve such ideal futures, many writers in the ‘end of the world’ genre treat [black, indigenous, people of color] as instruments or objects of sacrifice. In a stunning display of white possessive logic, Hanson suggests that, in the face of global crisis, it

‘might make sense to stock a refuge with real hunter-gatherers and subsistence farmers, together with the tools they find useful. Of course, such people would need to be disciplined enough to wait peacefully in the refuge until the time to emerge was right.

In this imaginary, Hanson quite literally suggests the (re-/continuing)imprisonment, (re-/continuing)enslavement and biopolitical (re-/continuing) instrumentalization of living BIPOC in order to enable the future re-generation of whiteness. This echoes the dystopian nightmare world described in …

And this in a academic journal article that supposedly passed peer review! (I was not one of the “peers” consulted.)

To be very clear, I proposed to hire skilled foragers and subsistence farmers to serve in such roles, compensating them as needed to gain their consent. I didn’t much care about their race, nor about the race of the world that would result from their repopulating the world. And presumably someone with substantial racial motivations would in fact care more about that last part; how exactly does repopulating the world with people of color promote “whiteness”?