From a Net-friend:

It’s interesting that people see the blurring of disciplinary boundaries as a negative or disadvatage. I certainly think that we have a lot to gain from cross disciplinary pollenation. This has always just seemed to make sense to me but I was recently reading a bit more of John Ralston Saul’s ‘Voltaire’s Bastards: A Dictatorship of Reason in the West’ and was pleasantly surprised to find some deeper thinking to back me up. He was talking about how reason has led/pushed us into specialisation (among other things) and the demise of the generalist. The result is that decision making power and control rests with bureaucratic ‘experts’ with specialist knowledge that they don’t share with Joe Bloggs because ‘it’s above him’. Thus removing the average citizen from the democratic decision making process.

I hope I’ve done justice to Ralston Saul, he’s a great thinker.