The existence and persistence of slavery or slavery-like conditions is a humanistic, philosophical, ethical and theological challenge to this day. Why do some humans enslave other human beings, their co-equals?

The oldest codification of laws, the Code of Hammurabi, written around 1772 BC in Iran, already refers to the class of slaves. And so on throughout history to the present day. The Walk Free Foundation, which deals with slavery worldwide, estimates that today there are about 40.3 million people in slavery, due to human trafficking, debts, forced labour or marriage, etc. India leads the list, with 7.99 million enslaved. Data from Brazil in 2018 pointed to 369 thousand people in conditions analogous to slavery or enslaved.

The most brilliant minds in the West saw it as natural and even owned slaves. Thus Aristotle, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Hegel. Thomas Jefferson himself, who formulated the United States' Declaration of Independence, which stated that all human beings are born free and have equal rights, owned slaves, as did our Tiradentes, who owned at least six. The famous Father Antônio Vieira preached to the slaves in a sugar plant: "You are imitators of Christ crucified because you suffer in a way very similar to what the Lord himself suffered on his cross and in all his passion" even calling them "blessed" for that reason. A pious and, at the same time, cruel justification.

To sum it up, the great specialist in slavery, the Jamaican Orlando Petterson, professor at Harvard, states: "Slavery has existed from the beginning of human history until the 20th century (21st), in the most primitive societies and also in the most advanced ones" (cf. L. Gomes, Escravidão, p.65).

What reasons led to slavery? To this day no explanation has proved convincing. But we can explore some reasons, albeit all of them precarious.

The first could have been patriarchy. 10-12 thousand years ago, the man-male imposed himself on everyone, on the woman, on the children, on nature. He superimposed himself on the other, making him his servant and slave. Slavery would thus be the daughter of patriarchy still in force today.

The second reason, of a philosophical nature, sustains that the human being is a decadent being. Not in an ethical sense but in an ontological one. That is, his nature is such that he never manages to be what he should or would like to be. There is an internal bond that prevents him from making the necessary leap: controlling and integrating his impulses, which are not in themselves bad, but natural: anger, the use of force, power as a capacity for domination. The human being falls in the sense of giving free rein to these impulses and thus becomes inhuman. Where does this inability come from? From the contradiction between infinite desire and finite reality? He could well coexist cheerfully with the infinite, welcoming his finite being. But he did not and does not do so. The wound keeps bleeding and causing further bloodshed.

I consider that ancestral Judeo-Christian wisdom brings us some light. It speaks of original sin. The term is not biblical, for the bible uses "sin of the world", or "the human being is inclined to evil from his youth". Original sin is a term created by St. Augustine (354-430) in his intense exchange of letters with St. Jerome and in controversy with the theologian Pelagius.

Original sin, according to him, does not have the temporal connotation of "from the beginning". Original concerns the archetypal, first and essential core of the human being. In his deepest interior there is a rupture: with nature, not respecting its rhythms, with the other, hating him, and with the Definitively Important. He considers himself the most important because he is endowed with reason. For this reason he imagines that he can explain himself, as if he himself had given himself existence and not Someone who makes him come into this world. Original sin is that hybris and arrogance. It means: magnifying oneself to the point of excluding others and the Great Other who created him.

The first consequence is the establishment of the dictatorship of reason. It pretends to explain everything and through it to dominate everything. A vain purpose. The human being is not only reason. He is mainly heart, sensitivity and love. Well before reason, the logos, in terms of anthropogenesis, came feeling, pathos. This dimension has been repressed and even denied. With that, one stopped feeling the other, putting oneself in his place, rejoicing and suffering with him. The other was objectified, that is, made into an object of use and abuse. The domination of the other emerged. The enslavement of one human over another human began.

Not feeling others as our fellow human beings and not having empathy with them is "our original sin", the origin of yesterday's and today's slavery and of the system of systematic exploitation of people based on private accumulation, of the self without others. Without embracing the other as co-equal and without hearing the cry of the Earth, original sin continues to be reproduced. But there will be no future for our kind of world and civilization. Another world will come of the free and fraternal living happily together in the short time that is granted to us.

2020-01-25

(Translation ALAI)

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