The British Humanist Association has funded the atheist bus ad campaign in London: “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” It’s a common sense sentiment that religious types should heed; we often get so caught up in defending the more arcane points of religious belief that we forget why belief is important to us in the first place—to guide us in living well. In fact, the atheist bus ad sentiment is not unique to atheists, nor even original. Last year Gretta Vosper published With Or Without God: Why the way we live is more important than what we believe. A United Church of Canada minister views her beliefs as compatible with the message of an atheist organization. Nevertheless, it is precisely because the ads have been sponsored by an atheist organization that such a controversy has arisen.
Atheist groups have been using the same tactics in other European and North American cities. In fact, since the 2004 publication of The End of Faith, by Sam Harris, a spate of books by Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens has transformed the so-called “new atheism” into a thorn in the flesh of belief. This has led the United Church Observer to ask February’s lead story: “True Believers: Atheism has become radicalized. Was it something we said?” It’s a question that coincides with the announcement by the Freethought Association of Canada that Toronto will be getting its very own atheist bus ad campaign.
Does Toronto deserve an atheist bus ad campaign? It may be that, at present, Toronto is too culturally immature to warrant such a message.
First, it’s important to recognize that Toronto is not an American city. I have read sources that claim Toronto is the 5th largest American city (Wikipedia say it’s 8th) and if I were more patriotic, I might find that claim insulting, but my quibbling isn’t with the fact that Toronto is technically a Canadian city, but with the fact that Toronto is, in its cultural nuance, about as un-American a city as one can find.
Toronto has long fostered a culture of irony that often goes unnoticed by visitors. I first became aware of an ironic flavour to my civic identity when, as a high school student, I participated in music exchanges. In grade ten, for example, I found myself billeted in a Washington home where the dad was an ex-marine and the son was a weight-lifting, running-back marching band clarinet player. The Washington kids did their best to hide their contempt for our goofy sloppiness. In turn, we pretended to be impressed by their military discipline and precise execution. They were all school spirit and razzle-dazzle and rah, rah, rah with pom poms. But maybe they missed our smirks. We thought it was funny. Some displays are so over-the-top that they defy parody; the thing itself becomes the joke (which pretty much sums up how a lot of gen-X Canadians view America).
The school spirit I first witnessed in Washington I later came to view as a tool for enculturating patriotism. Students are taught to lose themselves in the corporate identity—first through school spirit, then through civic pride, then through nationalism. This is ironic given that America claims to have invented the notion of individual achievement. Meanwhile, north of the border, in the land that some deride as socialist, a generalized indifference has been honed to a fine virtue and creates space for an individual achievement all its own—a kind of subversive irony.
In Canada, we have witnessed that virtue in our leaders, most notably Trudeau, who gave western farmers the finger, danced mocking pirouettes behind the Queen’s back, and screwed around on the side with Barbara Streisand, etc. It’s not that we forgave him; it’s simply that we didn’t care. Toronto took the Canadian indifference to a higher ground—a hogtown apathy! Police gave up enforcing marijuana possession laws. Why bother? When the former mayor made off-colour remarks that would have been political suicide elsewhere, we re-elected him. When American venues were shunning the Dixie Chicks like they were lepers, Toronto booked them for extra nights. The Maple Leafs haven’t won a Stanley Cup in 43 years and still sell out because we love our losers. And several years ago, when we hosted a convention for North American chiefs of police, American participants were upset because they were told to leave sidearms at home. What they failed to understand is that even our criminals are apathetic. Just compare, for example, homicide rates in Toronto to those of a comparable American city and you’ll see that our local criminals consistently underperform. (See Chicago, which saw 266 gun-related homicides committed by people under 21 in 1997, and more recently, 443 murders in 2007. Or Philadelphia with 392 murders in 2007. Or Houston with 351 murders in the same year.) Our murderers can’t even break out of double digits.
Into such a culture of indifference, one wonders if atheist bus ads could have any traction in Toronto. While Sam Harris complains that no self-declared atheist could ever be elected to public office in the U.S., it is unlikely that a declaration of atheism would be an impediment here. This suggests that if the ad campaign is motivated by a perceived need for advocacy, then, at least in Toronto, it’s a waste of money. We’re not engaged enough to discriminate against atheists. We just don’t care.
This week, the local Breakfast Television franchise did a survey of viewers. They asked: Do you think advertising atheism is offensive? Marginally more viewers responded “yes.” Co-host Kevin Frankish observed that the survey elicited an unusually high volume of responses. Two thoughts:
1) Most people equate the word “offensive” with “different” or “I disagree with it.” However, neither of these meanings is an adequate reason for feeling morally offended. If I learned that atheists endorse eating babies for breakfast, then atheist advertising would be morally offensive. But I’m less inclined—maybe even unwilling—to take offense at someone’s metaphysical perspective.
2) I am beginning to suspect that the Toronto I grew up in has vanished. Its tolerance and almost comical apathy is giving ground to the more militant polarization of American-style public discourse.
We now have an American-style TV drama (Flashpoint) that portrays Toronto as a generic American city that regularly requires the services of a SWAT team. This is nonsense of course, but if we continue to imagine it that way, then the fiction will breed its own truth.
Notwithstanding Michael Moore’s traipse through Canadian neighbourhoods (Bowling For Columbine), barging into our homes and finding a trusting simple folk living there, most home-owners in Toronto now keep their doors locked and arm their alarm systems when they go out.
And we regularly entertain debate about a two-tiered health care system, so that increasingly the word socialism is acquiring a taint that it never knew before.
Why this cultural shift?
One obvious answer is our proximity to the U.S. border. It makes us susceptible to foul winds blowing across the lake. One such wind threw a dark cloud northward when Parliament was debating same-sex marriage and American fundamentalist organizations funded lobbyists in Ottawa, as if Ottawa were a smaller version of Washington. Their efforts were useless, but it is this blindness to cultural difference which is so disturbing and which, sadly, tends to produce a self-justifying cultural flatness.
The other obvious answer is – well – blogs. Because there are no borders in the blogosphere, there is a tendency to forget that each blog is rooted to a place with its own local culture. We bloggers tend, perhaps unconsciously, to self-censor many of our local details so that our context has a broader, more generic appeal. (This is analogous to the preference for the General American dialect spoken by our news anchors. Ironically, the embodiment of this ideal was Peter Jennings who acquired his accent because he grew up in—you guessed it—Toronto.) We also tend to be reductive, following newspaper rules of journalism (key words in title, most important points in first sentence, other points arranged in descending order of importance) because that’s how search engines index our posts. And we’re supposed to take an extreme point of view to attract lots of comments from incensed readers. In short, blogging is structured in a way that flattens difference and promotes polarization. The previous sentence may seem paradoxical. However, difference describes a plural environment. Polarization describes a binary environment.
I find the atheist bus ads offensive, not because I disagree with atheism, but because the ads promote a particular kind of conversation—one which is reductive and polarized. One gets the impression that the promoters have taken a generic format from one location (London) and have sought to impose it in other locations without regard for nuance nor for local cultural difference. In some measure, these are the tactics of imperialism. These are the tactics of proselytism. Let’s be blunt: these are the already disreputable tactics of bad religion.
Photo Credit: Zoe Margolis [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)]