Governing without Passion: Willard's Call for a Rhetoric of Competence

Charles Willard has taken a new turn in his scholarship. In Liberalism and the Problem of Knowledge, he uses his theorizing on argument fields to critique liberalism and propose a "new rhetoric for modern democracy." This "new rhetoric" is "a move away from one discourse, liberalism, to a different discourse, epistemics" (p. 3). In advocating this rhetorical substitution, Willard grounds his case in the consequences of passion. He argues that democracy would be better served by the cool discourse of epistemics than by the provocative language of liberalism. In building his case, Willard spins two tales. The first I will call the "Rousseau Story." This tale is a nightmare. It is a vision of a tyrannical Rousseau in contemporary times. He is firing the flames of ethnic, religious, and nationalist hatreds in the name of political authenticity. In all its particulars, the Rousseau Story is a tragedy. The human quest for community is a tragic flaw. "Historic peoples," Willard reports, "are recovering their rich cultural heritages by slaughtering their neighbors - in Azerbaijan, Slovenia, Croatia, Moldova, South Ossetia, Nagorno-Karabakh, and further afield, in Angola, Burundi, Rawanda, Zaire, Turkey, the Sudan, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, and Paua New Guinea. Identity, apparently, abhors a vacuum, and when people set out to fill this void, they often fill it with corpses" (p. 3). The Rousseau Story is familiar. It is the old tale of melting pot anxiety. The melting pot is supposed to protect American society from the importation of old-world hatreds. Yet, nagging at the liberal mind is the fear that without these sources of identity a hedonistic individualism will take root. Americans without roots will become more consumers than citizens. The resultant loss of cultural identity will lead citizens to search for authenticity in their politics. Willard offers as a representative anecdote Hillary Rodham Clinton's call for a "politics of meaning." She cries for America to awake from "a sickness of the soul"; she says that material well-being is not enough, "that we lack at some core level meaning in our individual lives and meaning collectively"; she describes us as "crippled by alienation and despair and hopelessness"; and she prescribes a redefinition of "what it means to be a human being in the twentieth century, moving into a new millennium" (p. 40). Unfortunately, this humane undertaking eventually feeds on the most convenient sources of identity - religion, ethnicity, nationalism, and race. The hunger for community and authenticity is a slippery slope to balkanization. The second tale I call the "Incompetence Story." This tale is less frightening than the first, but it is no less a narrative of dysfunction. The drama is set against the "complexity" of the modem welfare state. The complexity of the scene means that "no single intelligence can grasp" the competing expert claims about its condition; "no panoptic, overarching point of view is available to tie all the loose ends together" (p. 5). This story is about the failed liberal attempts to graph "the problem of knowledge" and the resultant lesson of "why states blunder rather more than they should and why their decisions are often less rational than we would like" (p. 5). The Incompetence Story is a comedy. The buffoonish characters at the play's outset - disciplinary experts, policy analysts, politicians, and a woefully unprepared public - act out a Keystone Cops' attempt at governing. They communicate in a babble of incommensurable discourses. As the action proceeds, however, these disparate actors find a political Esperanto, the discourse of epistemics. In the end, the babble of tongues becomes translatable as these travelers from various different knowledge fields begin to talk reasonably to one another. The Incompetence Story is also familiar. I first encountered a variation of it in Daniel Bell's End of Ideology. Bell (1962), writing at the end of the fifties, proclaims that "in the West, among the intellectuals, the old passions are spent. …