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 hierarchies[2] 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."
"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. ↩
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." ↩