5.3: Straw Man

When soldiers fought with bayonets on their rifles, they would train by attacking straw men. Straw men are fairly easy to stab with a bayonet since they don’t run away or fight back. But then stabbing a straw man is no victory over an actual opponent. The fallacy of straw man is committed when someone criticizes an easy to attack distortion of an argument or idea rather than the actual view. Like many fallacies, this one can be committed deliberately or inadvertently. In our highly polarized social media environment, it is not uncommon for a disingenuous manipulator to deliberately broadcast a straw man attack (or some other fallacy) all the while knowing that his audience, lacking well-developed critical thinking skills, will fall for the manipulation and go on to propagate the bad argument unwittingly. This is often how propaganda works.

You may have heard a commonly propagated straw man attack committed against efforts to address climate change. Critics will often charge that people concerned about climate change are really just socialists looking to take our freedom away. There’s a lot going on here and its worth pointing out the fallacies are gregarious. It is quite possible to commit more than one at a time. So, you might also notice an element of ad hominem in this example where reasons for taking climate seriously get ignored in favor of attacking the people trying to take climate change seriously. This sheds some light on the old quip that lies travel half way around the world before the truth gets its shoes on. It takes lots more work to diagnose and filter out fallacies than it does to commit and propagate them.

But aside from the ad hominem attack, the notion that people who want to see action on climate change are just big government lovers includes a straw man fallacy. It is easy and appealing to attack the socialist idea of government taking over the economy. It is not so easy to attack the idea that we have a serious problem in climate change and effective government action will be required to address it. Climate advocates are not arguing for socialism, a complete government take-over of the economy. They are arguing for government and business to work together to move us rapidly towards a sustainable economy, one that is based on renewable energy instead of fossil fuels, sustainable agriculture instead of deforestation, etc. Who owns and operates the industries of the future is simply not what is at issue, though many climate activists will be quick to point out the entrepreneurial opportunities in shifting to a more sustainable economy. In light of the existential risk we face in climate change, the policy measures called for are much harder to argue against than the straw man of widely despised socialism.