Well-informed readers of this weblog (a tautology, surely) will know what I mean if I say that recently several organisations that I would once have thought above criticism have suffered in my esteem. Amnesty and the Red Cross seem to have adopted a world-view in which the West and its enemies are morally equivalent. The UN no longer seems to me like an essential source of legitimacy, its moral authority eroded by corruption and a highly selective approach to human rights.
Index on Censorship is the most recent and egregious example. Doubtless they were just trying to stimulate a lively debate - an all-purpose excuse nowadays used by people who have said something offensive and stupid, an excuse which has the charming advantage of allowing one to reclaim the moral high ground by implying that one's critics are trying to stifle debate.
Stuff happens. In this case, what's happened is a classic case of what the Japanese call aware: the evanescence of things. Christian theology has a similar idea: the inherent corruptibility of all things. (Even the Church, though divinely founded, was corrupted within a few centuries.) The better a thing is founded, the longer it will go before it is corrupted, though the corruption is inherent and inevitable. The UN was ill-founded, marred from the first by the need to draw Stalin's USSR into it. Amnesty and suchlike bodies, founded on good liberal principles, are corrupted more slowly, and in a somewhat different way.
Prisoners' Dilemma has always fascinated me. It seems to have so many applications in unexpected places - unexpected, that is, at first sight, though less so when one reflects that PD is ultimately about trust, and the question of trust is fundamental to the res publica. The optimal strategy is called Tit For Tat: one normally 'cooperates' with one's fellow-prisoner, but if he 'defects', then one should retaliate by doing likewise in the next iteration.
Imagine a group of good liberal humanists setting up an organisation to campaign for human rights. They are all liberals of the Tit for Tat variety: though they are keen to co-operate with their more radical comrades ("no enemies on the left") they accept the need for rules to ensure that the aims of the organisation are maintained. Since this is clear at the outset, no-one ever betrays the values of the organisation.
Except that this very success creates a weakness. Because no-one ever Defects, the individuals who make up the organisation start to assume that their strategy is Always Cooperate rather than TfT. Both seem to have the same results. To begin with, this doesn't matter. But then one or more radicals of the SWP type get in. They aren't interested in human rights: they're interested in getting their own way. The Always Cooperate liberals don't know how to respond. Within a short space of time, they've been muscled out, allowed to retain one or two symbolic positions to ensure that all concerned can pretend that it's just a broad-based alliance of like-minded people.
This idea - of TfT Erosion - isn't an original theme, though I don't know who first identified the phenomenon. Something like this, I suspect, is why it is good humanistic liberals always end up getting shafted. Adopting a consistent conscious policy of Tit for Tat makes you look too much - horror, horror - like a conservative.
Furthermore it occurs to me that the split between TfT and Always Cooperate looks rather like the split between the EU and US in foreign policy. The latest dealings involving the EU, US and Iran seem to illustrate the point: the EU makes a deal with Iran in 2003. Iran rats on the deal. The EU makes the same deal again. The EU, and most of the European public, appears to have forgotten that diplomacy is only meaningful when one has a trustworthy interlocutor.
Everything we do is cherry blossom, unless we reflect on what we're doing and learn. And we are as likely to forget as learn.