Keith Hudson wrote:
The only partially successful form of objective truth-seeking (with itsPolitics is more like Art and you don't trust peer review with artists anymore than the Republicans do here. If you did you would look more seriously at modern art and take less refuge in the sensual past. Peer review almost killed the NEA here in the US. There are certain areas where everyone believes themselves equal to the experts and all knowledge reduced to opinion. It isn't but it causes a real problem for Democracy. The only answer is smarter people.
influence on policy-making) that mankind has developed so far is the peer
review system in our universities and scientific disciplines. This has its
faults but something like this is what we now need in politics and
government. We need policy forums for the future, not party political
manifestos which are so long and tedious and, ultimately, platitudinous,
that they don;t really mean anything. Peer review would be democratic in
that anybody could join whatever policy forum that interested them, but if
they wanted their ideas to succeed they would have to argue their way
cogently against their peers in order to get their policies accepted at a
high level.
Quite how policy forums would intermesh with the civil service is still
problematical to me, but the mushrooming of single-issue groups in the last
few decades in all advanced countries convinces me that we're beginning to
see the evolution of this type of forum politics.
This all sounds like Technocracy to me. Maybe someone else
could help me on this. I believe that the answer
lies in culturally sophisticated people who can trust each other's professional
expertise and experience and which doesn't reduce all action to a statement
of economic power. What do you all think?
Ray Evans Harrell, artistic director
The Magic Circle Opera Repertory Ensemble, Inc.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
