> And today, it's nearly universally accepted as wrong and almost completely eradicated.

It's nowhere close to eradicated. The broadest measure of slavery today includes roughly 50 million people. A more narrow figure, that would be similar to the slavery you're referring to, is closer to 10-20 million people.

There are an estimated 7.5 million people in forced labor slavery in fields like construction and mining; 1.7 million in agriculture labor slavery; there are several million women held in sexual slavery, in the sex trafficking trade, across the world.

https://www.humanrightsfirst.org/resource/human-trafficking-...

As a proportion of the world population the enslaved is still on a downtrend. How many years (which is what I mean by 'almost') do you suppose it will take us to get from 1% or so to 0.01%?

With an important caveat: it’s almost completely eradicated _for now_. Civilizations come and go. Perpetual human progress is only possible if that’s what the strongest group of people want and are willing to fight for it. “Live free or die” wasn’t a cute mantra; it was a rallying cry and a warning.

In the US, slavery was eradicated literally by the sword.

The real genius of the Founding Fathers of the US was their distrust of human nature (and consequent aversion to centralized power).

> With an important caveat: it’s almost completely eradicated _for now_.

That's not even close to true. There are ~30 million slaves worldwide today [1]. I can't find a concise worldwide total for around the time most people imagine is the peak of slavery, at least in the US (1860?), but that was "only" less than 4 million [2].

Whatever point was being made about slavery as an example in this conversation IMO points exactly the opposite way the GP intended: that slavery is a "natural" state for humans to end up in, and it requires continuous effort to prevent it. Just like war.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_21st_century#St...

2. https://www.thirteen.org/wnet/slavery/timeline/1860.html

Are you normalizing to the total human population?

So currently 30 million slaves out of a 7 billion population is under a half a percent, compared to 4 million slaves in the us out of a US population of 30 million is almost 7 percent.

I'd say that's an improvement

It seems that ~60 million people are affected by war [1], "only" ~2x as many. So I think that the original point I was making stands: neither slavery nor war are things that humans "grew out of". They both need significant, active effort by people to avoid/contain/resist.

1. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2015/jun/18/5...

And exactly what do you think will happen if one of the countries that doesn't care about slavery overtakes the collective "west" in military might? Do you think China bats an eye at slavery in Africa? Do you think they bat an eye at slavery in North Korea?

Just because it's universally accepted as wrong in the West doesn't mean the rest of the world agrees.

Not sure I see the connection. People who disagreed with slavery just didn't have slaves.

At any rate, what ended slavery in the US? War!

That's true for the us and Haiti and where else?