Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

The Inequality of Human Rights

A very engaging review The students were  furious . For the first week of class, they read the polemical first chapter, which argues that human rights are not eternal universal truths, but rather a set of political claims that emerged in the 1970s amid a crisis of the moral authority of communism. They simply would not believe that their own highest ideals dated not to the Bible or “the golden rule” but to the age of disco. As it turned out, the students had a preconceived notion of what it meant to have their preconceived notions challenged, and it did not include historicizing their own moral commitments. This provoked reflection about what historicizing something means and how legitimacy for moral claims is constructed. The Inequality of "Human Rights"

A book review  "In one of No Enough's most important insights, Moyn suggests that the gradual abandonment of equality in favour of a minimalist focus on securing a basic minimum has made human rights unthreatening in a neoliberal age. Moyn’s account of the compatibility of human rights and neoliberalism is powerful and astute. Human rights did little to alter the course of neoliberal reform, offered no real alternative to it, and did not demand egalitarian distribution either at the national or transnational level, he argues. Moreover, human rights and what he terms their “economic rival” shared the same moral individualism and the same suspicion of collectivist projects such as nationalism and socialism. Consequently, even social and economic rights became adjuncts to humanitarian philanthropy, which viewed global poverty through the lens of humanitarian suffering, not structural inequality.  
Moyn provides a strikingly original account of the ways in which demands for a...

"Western liberals were widely perceived as ‘false friends’, as Conor Cruise O’Brien reported from Africa in the 1960s, and liberalism itself as an ‘ingratiating moral mask which a toughly acquisitive society wears before the world it robs’. Distrust of the Western discourse of human rights was likewise constant and deep. The Indonesian thinker Soedjatmoko challenged its presumption of universal morality, pointing to the global inequalities perpetuated by the champions of human rights. Arundhati Roy spoke in 2004 of an ‘alarming shift of paradigm’: ‘Even among the well-intentioned, the expansive, magnificent concept of justice is gradually being substituted with the reduced, far more fragile discourse of “human rights”’ – a minimalist request, basically, not to be killed, tortured or unjustly imprisoned. As a result, she argued ‘resistance movements in poor countries … view human rights NGOs as modern-day missionaries,’ complicit in the West’s attempt to impose an ‘unjust politica...

Excellent! A must read. " ‘The deterioration of the intelligentsia,’ Arthur Koestler wrote, ‘is as much a symptom of disease as the corruption of the ruling class or the sleeping sickness of the proletariat. They are symptoms of the same fundamental process.’ One clear sign of intellectual infirmity is the desperation with which centrists and liberals, removed from the cockpit of American power, forage for ideas and inspiration on the lumpen right.  What differentiated the Western model from many Asian, African and Latin American networks of women’s groups and indigenous peoples, or alternative development and environmental organisations, was its indifference to ‘economic and social rights’: what Moyn defines as ‘entitlements to work, education, social assistance, health, housing, food and water’. Focusing on the violations of individuals’ rights by states, human rights groups valuably documented the crimes of the Contras in Nicaragua, the army and death squads in El Salvador,...