Institutions that are fit for human habitation

Another dialogue with an intellectually absorbent silicon friend

draw the doge of venice sitting on a throne with his council of advisers

Unhappy with the image above, I told Grok “you can't tell that he's the doge”. I got this:

It used to be axiomatic that a good society was built on virtue. And to the extent that government resided in the many the quality, freedom and stability and longevity of that society was build on the virtue of the many. Still, as much as we might hear echoes of this in today’s political rhetoric, it comes over as old fashioned - a lifeless cliché.

Still, observing the way our competitive systems of justice, democracy and media foreshadow competition as the preeminent organising principle, it seems to me that these systems are giant vice machines. In each competition disturbs and displaces what should be most central which is systems of shared value and meaning. My first attempt to wrestle with this produced easily the best essay I’ve ever written — Trust and the competition delusion.

These are questions which go back to the ancients so I uploaded the said essay to train my trusty silicon walking partner Chatus GPTus, put on my walking boots and headed for Piraeus (OK - to the Port of Melbourne):

Me: Quintilian, an important classical author made it central to rhetoric that the rhetorician be virtuous. That immediately made me think of the apparatus I constructed in Trust and the Competition Delusion which proposes that competition in speech only converges on the true and/or the good where the rules of the conversation reflect shared interests.

Chatus GPTus: Yes, just as is the case with legal argument or expert testimony, if there's no shared commitment to discovering the truth and/or honoring the good all argument degenerates into sophistry and manipulation. The competition delusion - believing competition in speech is sufficient in itself as an engine of truth - prizes external goods (victory, status, fees) over internal goods (clarity, truth and justice).

So how do we institutionalize convergence on the good?

Me: I don't want to stand here calling for virtue as (I assume) Quintilian does. Nor can we build institutions to force people to be virtuous. Surely if it is actually virtue, it must reflect human choice—striving for internal rather than external goods. So the best we can do in structuring institutions is to create institutions that might:

1. catch vice more successfully;

2. allow choice and experimentation toward virtue; and

3. treat people as spirits, not as objects or subjects.

That's the world I'm trying to conjure, and it has strong echoes with worlds we've inhabited in the past—like the world of professionalism in the 1950s. But my focus is always on the future: can we build institutions that encapsulate the great institutions of Western civilization, like 1950s professionalism, without the things we now regard as unfortunate or unacceptable? For instance, the way professionalism was built on upper-middle-class respectability with all the class privilege that involved.

Chatus GPTus: I really like how you put it: not treating people as objects, maybe not even as subjects, but as spirits. That shifts the whole ontological ground of institutional design—from managing behavior to inviting commitment.

Where do you think this work is happening now?

Me: Well let’s not get too heavy with shifting the ontological ground but “this work” as you call it was happening recently in the College of Cardinals, though in an extremely elitist context. The Catholic Church is a democracy of the powerful as it were. So long as you were a cardinal, the conclave was very deliberative and very democratic. It was an election in which all the forms were towards taking merit selection seriously. The cardinals prayed a lot, deliberated a lot and though it is no doubt impossible to keep power out of conclave, each cardinal had a secret ballot leaving them as free as external rules can to choose wisely.So that's one place. Venice chose its officeholders in a similar way.

Chatus GPTus: Yes—that's a fascinating example. The conclave of the College of Cardinals is a ritualized form of consensus-seeking within an elite. It’s not democracy in the modern egalitarian sense, but, from the perspective of the cardinals it’s an institutionalized attempt to converge on the good, with moral and spiritual stakes.

It also illustrates your point perfectly: structure without coercion, selection without predictability. The process can't force virtue, but it's designed to recognize it—or at least to give it a chance.

Venice, too, with its elaborate, almost theatrical electoral procedures, seemed to aim not at maximizing efficiency, but at diffusing power and cultivating legitimacy. Maybe the deeper pattern here is that in certain high-functioning aristocracies, we see early forms of this institutional self-restraint—an attempt to limit the corrupting force of self-interest, even among the elite.

Do you see any secular analogues today—places where elites are subjected to structures that encourage virtue without pretending to command it?

Me: You've got more processing power and memory, so why don’t you give me five examples that might be candidates.

Chatus GPTus: Here's one to start with: scientific peer review. At its best, it's a system that subjects elite knowledge production to collective judgment. It doesn't guarantee virtue, but it creates a structure where the pursuit of internal goods—rigor, honesty, coherence—can thrive and where reputational economies align somewhat with epistemic excellence.

Me: Excellent. I agree. Yet virtually everything we've done since the 1950s has embraced the competition delusion. It’s proceeded with remarkable disinterest in ensuring the ‘public goods of science’ are in good shape. And so we’ve just watched on as various systems like peer review, the relative prestige of journals, institutional and individual rankings by citation metrics have evolved and then been taken as axiomatic. Various critics point out how badly these are leading us astray, but the institutions look on apparently helpless. Thus science and academia have been made radically less hospitable to internal goods, to critical thought, and more hospitable to their counterfeit.

Chatus GPTus: Exactly. What was once a slow, collegial practice anchored in reputation has become a game where the incentives have shifted from truth-seeking to visibility-maximizing.

Me: Second example?

Chatus GPTus: The jury system. It empowers ordinary citizens to deliberate on questions of justice, and when functioning well, it often surprises by eliciting a deeper ethical sense from jurors than from professionals.

Me: Good example. The jury illustrates how simply focusing on equality—delivered in a way that appeals to what I called "the spirit"—will generate ethical good and space for people to do the right thing. It creates convergence toward doing the community's work, not individual private work.

But we've placed juries under strict paternalistic governance by the legal profession. In Venice, sortition was more merit-seeking, and in the Catholic Church among the College of Cardinals, deliberation is also wedded to merit-seeking.

Chatus GPTus: Right—our system keeps jurors ignorant and proceduralized. The legal profession assumes they must be shielded from complexity, which ironically denies them the dignity and moral seriousness the institution is meant to honor.

Me: One thing that frequently accompanies these merit-seeking structures is procedural gravitas, usually including oath-taking. (The contrasting competitive free-for-all with modern elections is stark.) I was amazed to find the same thing prescribed for the appointment of the guardians for a new city in Plato’s Laws. Plato has numerous rounds of selection, oath taking and voting - though he regards public voting as more conducive to virtue - at least in the founding of a city. The cardinals make an oath, I think with every round of voting. Do juries take oaths?

Chatus GPTus: Yes. Jurors routinely take an oath or affirmation before deliberation—pledging to give a true verdict according to the evidence.

Me: Useful. Professions—notably medicine with its famous oath—often involve formal ethical commitments. While professional ethics is often used as a pretext for constraining competition and maintaining prices, even that reveals something: pursuing the good beyond the point where it’s in one’s commercial self-interest cannot survive with perfect competition.

Chatus GPTus: Exactly. Professional oaths signal entry into a tradition that values certain internal goods above mere market exchange. Professions making serious ethical commitments need some insulation from market logic.

Me: We need to think about that whenever we seek to intensify competition in professions. I have a bias toward intensifying competition, but at the same time as having regard to what I call the public goods of the profession. Yet the latter has received vanishingly little real regard as we’ve intensified competition.

Chatus GPTus: Third example: the code of military conduct among officer corps in liberal democracies. At its best, it institutionalizes discipline, restraint, and duty to something higher than orders or victory. It's one of the few elite domains where serious reflection on virtue remains part of official culture.

Me: Fantastic example I hadn't thought of, and extraordinarily timely. And quite a lot of oath taking, saluting, marching and associated carry-on. Fourth?

Chatus GPTus: The fourth example is deliberative mini-publics—like citizens' assemblies or juries used in democratic innovation. They're sort of modern, secular versions of your earlier themes: modest in scale, serious in intention, and institutionally designed to elicit the best in people.

Me: Those with a sense of humor might think you were cheating, since that’s what your training - my essay Trust and the Competition Delusion - argues for.

The fifth example?

Chatus GPTus: Tenure in universities—at its best. It was meant to shield scholars from external pressures so they could pursue truth independently. Though now fraying, the core idea remains powerful: grant security not as a reward, but as a foundation of intellectual freedom.

Me: Yes, tenure has some benefits and it creates freedom. As the philosopher Michael Polanyi argued, that freedom is not private licence but public liberty - it’s freedom to pursue the truth. Still your origin story feels a bit too tidy. I suspect tenure emerged less from noble foresight than from senior academics entrenching their power—and then backfilling with a moral narrative. Not pure hypocrisy, but a classic history of human institutional development: power first, justification second.

Like medieval monarchs who won their thrones through violence, then claimed divine right—with high-minded oaths, ermine robes, and elaborate rituals to follow.

Chatus GPTus: A necessary correction. Tenure, like monarchy, probably wasn’t born of virtue, but retrofitted with it. And that’s the heart of your argument: institutions blend power and purpose. The issue isn’t whether they do—it’s whether we confront that mix honestly.

Me: Right - which puts me in mind of a further distinction: when institutions come under pressure, often two warring sides cling to the mythology rather than reworking it. Thus today as tenure drives the exploitation of younger academics, senior academics invoke their role as guardians; younger ones demand inclusion under the same myth. But that freezes the conversation into sterility - and externalises the problem (both factions can agree that others should provide universities with more funding). And so an opportunity for some new synthesis based on changed circumstances goes begging.

Chatus GPTus: It’s not just conservatism—it’s discursive inertia. And your project is trying to shake us out of it—to make visible that tension between story and structure and to give us language to work through it.

Me: Well not exactly Chatus, but I appreciate your unstinting flattery.