The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,97

that it ran contrary to the principles of justice “to give the creditor, in any case whatever, power over the body of his debtor.” The committee also noted that “if all the victims of oppression were presented to our view in one congregated mass, with all the train of wives, children, and friends, involved in the same ruin, they would exhibit a spectacle at which humanity would shudder.”88 Debt bondage was abolished by almost every American state between 1820 and 1840, and by most European governments in the 1860s and 1870s.

FIGURE 4–6. Time line for the abolition of slavery

Source: The most comprehensive list of abolitions I have found is “Abolition of slavery timeline,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolition_of_slavery_timeline, retrieved Aug. 18, 2009. Included are all entries from “Modern Timeline” that mention formal abolition of slavery in a political jurisdiction.

The history of our treatment of debtors, Payne notes, illustrates the mysterious process in which violence has declined in every sphere of life. Western societies have gone from enslaving and executing debtors to imprisoning them and then to seizing their assets to repay the debt. Even the seizure of assets, he points out, is a kind of violence: “When John buys groceries on credit and later refuses to pay for them, he has not used force. If the grocer goes to court and gets the police to seize John’s car or bank account, the grocer and police are the ones who are initiating the use of force.”89 And because it is a form of violence, even if people don’t usually think of it that way, this practice too has been in decline. The trend in bankruptcy law has been away from punishing debtors or squeezing assets out of them and toward giving them the opportunity of a fresh start. In many states a debtor’s house, car, retirement accounts, and spouse’s assets are protected, and when a person or company declares bankruptcy, they can write off many debts with impunity. In the old days of debtors’ prisons, people might have predicted that this lenience would spell the demise of capitalism, which depends on the repayment of loans. But the commercial ecosystem evolved workarounds for this loss of leverage. Credit checks, credit ratings, loan insurance, and credit cards are just some of the ways that economic life continued after borrowers could no longer be deterred by the threat of legal coercion. An entire category of violence evaporated, and mechanisms that carried out the same function materialized, without anyone realizing that that was what was happening.

Slavery and other forms of bondage, of course, have not been obliterated from the face of the earth. As a result of recent publicity about the trafficking of people for labor and prostitution, one sometimes hears the statistically illiterate and morally obtuse claim that nothing has changed since the 18th century, as if there were no difference between a clandestine practice in a few parts of the world and an authorized practice everywhere in the world. Moreover, modern human trafficking, as heinous as it is, cannot be equated with the horrors of the African slave trade. As David Feingold, who initiated the UNESCO Trafficking Statistics Project in 2003, notes of today’s hotbeds of trafficking:The identification of trafficking with chattel slavery—in particular, the transatlantic slave trade—is tenuous at best. In the 18th and 19th centuries, African slaves were kidnapped or captured in war. They were shipped to the New World into life-long servitude, from which they or their children could rarely escape. In contrast, although some trafficking victims are kidnapped, for most . . . , trafficking is migration gone terribly wrong. Most leave their homes voluntarily—though sometimes coerced by circumstance—in search of a materially better or more exciting life. Along the way, they become enmeshed in a coercive and exploitative situation. However, this situation rarely persists for life; nor . . . do the trafficked become a permanent or hereditary caste.90

Feingold also notes that the numbers of trafficking victims reported by activist groups and repeated by journalists and nongovernmental organizations are usually pulled out of thin air and inflated for their advocacy value. Nonetheless, even the activists recognize the fantastic progress that has been made. A statement by Kevin Bales, president of Free the Slaves, though it begins with a dubious statistic, puts the issue in perspective: “While the real number of slaves is the largest there has ever been, it is also probably the smallest proportion of the world population ever in slavery. Today, we don’t have to win the legal battle;