No Straw Men

Published in the Spectator (Hamilton College), November 14, 2003.

In my second semester of college, I began writing letters to the editor of the Spectator; it was and is a wonderful way to express one’s ideas without the usual complements of introduction, body, conclusion, etc. I soon turned to all-campus e-mails, an even less-demanding medium. Using my privileges as president of the Objectivist Club, I would preface our meeting announcements with short hooks to Hamilton. Yet I never really acted on my love for my writing—until now.

A few weeks ago, in my European Intellectual History class, I raised an objection to a point Professor Al Kelly had just made. He responded with characteristic wit: “Watch your straw men, Jon.” In elaborating, Professor Kelly explained that enlightened discourse proscribes arguments that are weak or imaginary, like straw, setup only to be summarily confuted. Still, we all resort to such recourse from time to time, since straw men are far easier to tackle than the ambiguities and contingencies and qualifications that make up reality.

Yet felling straw men says more about the feller than the felle. After all, you can judge a person by the enemies he not only makes but chooses, and if one addresses only the weakest arguments, one betrays the weakness of one’s own arguments. For instance, some hold that all feminists dismiss science as a male attempt to rape nature. But this notion simply upholds the most vocally irrational aspect of modern feminism, and reifies it as if it were the whole. Only dogmatists and demagogues waste time with such caricatures.

Scholars, on the other hand, refuse to engage in what the philosopher John Stuart Mill, in 1859, declared the gravest injustice of discourse: “to argue sophistically, to suppress facts or arguments, to misstate the elements of the case, or misrepresent the opposite opinion.” Scholars, as political theorist Chris Matthew Sciabarra remarks, “use an intellectual scalpel, rather than an ideological bludgeon,” to engage honestly and thoroughly with the most forcible criticism. As Aristotle counseled, “The fool tells me his reasons; the wise man persuades me with my own.”