There has been much discussion in Ottawa and other Canadian cities about a transit advertising campaign built around the messages that “there probably is no God so stop worrying and enjoy your life.” Many people object to the ads because they themselves find them offensive or because they fear that others will find them so. I’m not sure where I stand on that particular issue but I have a whole other reason for not liking the ads at all.
I feel much the same way about these ads as I do about those road-side signs that more and more churches are using to spread their messages. You know, those cute messages about how “God answers knee mail” and the like. Like the much-debated transit ads, they’re cute, they’re simple, and, it seems to me, they bring what could be an interesting and important discussion about life, God and religion down to the level of a Bazooka Joe comic strip. Come to think of it, most of those comic strips had more words than these ads and signs do.
As I reflected on the debate and drove by about a dozen church signs on my way home, I was reminded of a great article by a rhetorical scholar called J. Michael Sproole I read a few years back. I liked the article well enough when I first read it, but now, in the context of this controversy, I got it on a quite different level. Sproole’s point in this 1988 article in the Quarterly Journal of Speech, is that a new “managerial rhetoric” has largely supplanted other, more traditional forms of rhetoric. Sproole points out that the new rhetoric uses self-contained slogans to provide us with conclusions and “packaged ideology.” Sproole also points out “the old rhetoric built from facts, whereas the new rhetoric creates its own facts.” There is no effort in managerial rhetoric, nor in these ads, to carefully construct an argument and invite the audience to reflect. There’s just a punch line.
I’m all for a free marketplace of ideas. I think sharing information, comparing viewpoints and exchanging ideas can all contribute to a well functioning, modern democracy. I’m disapointed, though, that the best we can do in the free marketplace so many fought so hard to build is stand on our soap boxes and shout out tidy, packaged slogans that do little, if anything, to foster a genuine discussion on an important topic. If we’re going to defend free speech, shouldn’t it be for speech that belongs somewhere more enduring and inspiring than a gum wrapper?
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