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In his argument that violence has been declining for centuries, Steven Pinker (Oracle, Optimist, Ostrich, or Obfuscator? Part 1) claims that activities such as “slavery as a labor-saving device were unexceptionable features of life for most of human history”—and certainly slavery has been around a long time, but not equally so in all parts of the world.
However, today, Pinker insists, slavery and other such abominations “are rare to nonexistent in the West, far less common elsewhere than they used to be, concealed when they do occur, and widely condemned when they are brought to light.”
Such an assertion is disingenuous at best and dangerously deceptive at worst. Has slavery been nothing historically except a labor saving device? Is sex trafficking merely an effort at labor saving? If not, does that mean sex trafficking does not count as slavery? Has Pinker considered all the modern forms that slavery takes?
It seems unlikely that Pinker’s definition of slavery is as broad as that of the U.S. Department of State, whose definition of modern slavery includes forced labor, sex trafficking, bonded labor, debt bondage among migrant laborers, involuntary domestic servitude, forced child labor, child soldiers, and child sex trafficking (here’s a horror story on that topic). And how about convict labor, especially given that the U.S. prison population has quadrupled in the last four decades.
These forms of slavery are certainly concealed and often widely condemned when brought to light but many of them are not nonexistent and not even rare in the US and elsewhere in the West.
In a recent article in The Atlantic, J.J. Gould tells us, “150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, buying and selling people into forced labor is bigger than ever.” Indeed, he says, “There are now twice as many people enslaved in the world as there were in the 350 years of the transatlantic slave trade”—with the current global slave population estimated at between 20 million and 30 million people.
Seems to me it would take a lot of statistical shenanigans and redefinitions of terms to translate those figures into a “decline in slavery.”
Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology
