● The problem with technocracy is not the idea per se that the world could be run according to enlightened scientific principles, informed by empirical research – although this does tend to have a certain paternalistic quality.
The problem is that a small amount of genuine information is typically taken as the basis for fundamental rearrangement, ignoring the possibility that there are other factors, at least as important, which are being completely left out of the equation.
One of the things my colleagues and I at Oxford Forum want to do is to look at issues from a larger perspective. This doesn’t just mean a simplistic cross-discipline mixture. It means considering all the possible factors, including those which are currently being left out of account because they might yield answers that would be ideologically unacceptable.
The modern fashion for creating departments or professorships that ostensibly aim to bring two disparate subjects together (e.g. psychology and philosophy, science and religion), in order to overcome the narrowness of each, is another thing altogether. In most cases, this represents too mechanical an approach to the problem, meaning you end up with something that is less than the sum of its parts.