Governing without passion: Willard's call for a rhetoric of competence.

• Author: Lee, Ronald
• Position: Charles Willard's book entitled 'Liberalism and the Problem of Knowledge'

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. The new generation, with no meaningful memory of these old [ideological] debates, and no secure tradition to build upon, finds itself seeking new purposes within a framework of political society that has rejected, intellectually speaking, the old apocalyptic and chiliastic visions" (p. 404). "But the problem," Bell continues, "is that the old politico-economic radicalism . . . has lost its meaning, while the stultifying aspects of contemporary culture (e.g., television) cannot be redressed in political terms" (p. 404). At the end of ideology, "few serious minds believe any longer that one can set down 'blueprints' and through 'social engineering' bring about a new utopia of social harmony. At the same time, the older 'counter-beliefs' have lost their intellectual force as well. Few 'classic' liberals insist that the state should play no role in the economy, and few serious conservatives . . . believe that the Welfare State is the 'road to serfdom'" (p. 402).

I also recall hearing echoes of the incompetence story in the rhetoric of the New Frontier. Expanding Bell's thesis, John Kennedy told the 1962 Yale graduating class that American public office holders of earlier times had "spent entire careers . . . in grappling with a few dramatic issues on which the Nation was sharply and emotionally divided, issues that occupied the attention of a generation at a time: the national bank, the disposal of public lands, nullification or union, freedom or slavery, gold or silver." Today these "old sweeping issues very largely have disappeared" and in their place are "issues" that "are more subtle and less simple." These new issues "relate not to basic clashes of philosophy or ideology but to ways and means of reaching common goals." "What we need," Kennedy said, "is not labels and cliches but more basic discussion of the sophisticated and technical questions involved in keeping great economic machinery moving ahead" (Kennedy, 1962, pp. 470-471, 473). Kennedy had accepted, Lowi (1979) argues, "a general theory that the solution to our problems rested with the presidency and a professionalized bureaucracy" (p. 275). Acting on this theory, the administration ushered in an explosion of independent regulatory commissions, the reign of cost-benefit analysis, and an enormous expansion of the technical sphere in American governance.

Unlike Bell, who asserts the "End of Ideology" as a present condition, Willard asserts the return of the "Age of Ideology" and proceeds to offer a program for restoring the "End of Ideology." Willard has his ear to the tracks and feels the vibrations of an oncoming rush of ideological passion. He wants a new-fashioned New Frontier with a reliance on dispassionate elite competence. Willard offers a new and improved interest-group liberalism with the addition of a corrective for the "epistemic problems" of the old New Frontier. These "epistemic problems" are defined as "the predicaments of modern decision-makers - their dependence on authority, their inability to assess the states of consensus in disciplines, their incompetence in the face of burgeoning literatures, and their proneness to mistaken agreements" (p. 5). The "new discourse" of epistemics alleviates these competence problems.

The fascinating aspect of Liberalism and the Problem of Knowledge is Willard's marriage of the Rousseau and Incompetence narratives. He joins them in a very surprising way. Neither story is the causal precursor of the other. The quest for authenticity has not caused a crisis of competence nor has incompetence led to a longing for authenticity.(1) Instead, authenticity and incompetence are two poisons that share the same antidote.

Epistemics is a boundary-crossing discourse that facilitates expert-to-expert discussion and expert-to-policymaker communication and, thereby, mitigates incompetence. Less obvious is the relationship between epistemics and the Rousseauian nightmare. Willard proposes substituting epistemics' central value of "competence" for liberalism's emphasis on authenticity and community. It is the banal, tedious language of epistemics that makes it so attractive to Willard. One does not kill over competence; expert talk does not lead to tribal warfare; knowledge fields are transnational. Epistemics does not speak the language of ethnicity, religiosity, or nationalism. In a word, the discourse of epistemics is safe because it does not evoke "the people." At the conclusion of the book's introduction, Willard describes his alternative this way:

The move to epistemics replaces a rich, poignant, aesthetically-pleasing discourse with a dull, technical, and functional agenda - on a rationale that roughly resembles the case for dietary fiber. It sees democracy as a family of knowledge problems - and the veneration of culture, authenticity, community, and commensuration as impediments to discourse across differences. It is meant to be a bland diet for an interdependent world, a healthier alternative, as it were, to rhetorics that have gotten a bit overweight. (p. 10)

In the remainder of this essay, I assess these two stories. First, I examine Willard's case for an impending destructive thirst for political authenticity. Second, I...