I got the book Human Rights and the Uses of History by Samuel Moyn on a whim at the library. I've almost finished the first essay and so far the information is pretty squarely centered on revealing the tendency of historians to co-opt and justify a historical precedent of authority to co-opt "humanist" concepts to actually buffer imperial (and authoritarian) action under a "humanitarian" or "human rights" front.
I think it's a post-structural academic history book of essays (although I'm not sure Moyn would self-identify as "post-structural" simply due to the political connotations), which means it's "whooshy" in terms of the reading.
I tend to have an emotional reaction when I read the word "intersection" at this point, because the word "intersection"1 was (and probably is still) used to justify compounding identity politics to create activist hierarchies2 in the university setting (and God knows where else). Moyn used the word "intersection," and I braked at the intersection and realized he used it to identify compounding stinking ideological justifications, which is hilarious -- and gives me hope.
I think this excerpt from the preface is a decent elevator pitch and really captures the "whooshiness" (possibly inherent) in this sort of writing:
Not all Americans are liberal internationalists, and it would clearly be wrong to reduce the uses and abuses of history within the field of human rights to this framework. And I am myself of course subject to the maxim that all history is contemporary history. Reviewing these chapters, it is clear to me how deeply I have responded, in the years since the search for the origins of human rights began, to a specifically American vision of liberal internationalism that the end of the Cold War seemed to anoint as the framework for a human global order in the future. When I criticize others for keeping that dream alive rather that reflecting on the consequences of our experiences - notably but not exclusively in the Iraq war - for our original assumptions, I am clearly writing from a time-bound and local resistance to a central item in recent American intellectual history."
Footnotes
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"intersection" is just one of many words subverted in what may be better described as "a" or "the" word-based war of ideology and concept. I'm waiting for trickle down popular nonfiction books about it, because it's important but I feel out of my depth approaching it. I'm sure there are plenty of serious academic articles but I imagine they're a little too "whooshy" for me. Maybe I'll develop better reading comprehension someday. ↩
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Yes, you could imagine them as "victim hierarchies"; if I recall correctly, positions on these hierarchies determine the validity and importance of your socio-cultural grief and justify your claim to grief-sharing (and therefore, grief-making). It was actually presented in the form of a x-y graph. This seems to have trickled down into the regular world outside of the university (without necessarily the context) and it seems to rule the worldview of some people, which I find more troubling than "triggering." ↩