A Response to:
1. First stories tell us how the world was created. In The Truth about Stories, King tells us two creation stories; one about how Charm falls from the sky pregnant with twins and creates the world out of a bit of mud with the help of all the water animals, and another about God creating heaven and earth with his words, and then Adam and Eve and the Garden. King provides us with a neat analysis of how each story reflects a distinct worldview. “The Earth Diver” story reflects a world created through collaboration, the “Genesis” story reflects a world created through a single will and an imposed hierarchical order of things: God, man, animals, plants. The differences all seem to come down to co-operation or competition — a nice clean-cut satisfying dichotomy. However, a choice must be made: you can only believe ONE of the stories is the true story of creation – right? That’s the thing about creation stories; only one can be sacred and the others are just stories. Strangely, this analysis reflects the kind of binary thinking that Chamberlin, and so many others, including King himself, would caution us to stop and examine. So, why does King create dichotomies for us to examine these two creation stories? Why does he emphasize the believability of one story over the other — as he says, he purposefully tells us the “Genesis” story with an authoritative voice, and “The Earth Diver” story with a storyteller’s voice. Why does King give us this analysis that depends on pairing up oppositions into a tidy row of dichotomies? What is he trying to show us?
A Rhetoric Analysis of King’s Dichotomies
By Nolan Janssens
King gives his readers the opportunity to reflect on different cultures and what they hold sacred by positioning two different creation stories in binary opposition. While King himself and other scholars such as Chamberlin caution us against binary thinking, the dichotomies set up by King allow us to analyze the rhetoric of the creation stories rather than forcing the reader to believe one story over the other. King ends the chapter with “But don’t say in the years to come that you would have lived your life differently if only you had heard this story. You’ve heard it now.” (King 29). Here, King is referring to the story about Charm, the story that “celebrates equality and balance.” (24). King contrasts this story with the story of Genesis—a story that he points out is about law, order, good governance, and, I would argue, has influenced the ethos of human mastery over the planet. The idea that Christian stories lead to environmental destruction is also referred to in a paper by Lynn White’: “To a Christian, a tree can be no more than a physical fact. The whole concept of the sacred grove is alien to Christianity and the ethos of the West. For nearly two millennia Christian missionaries have been chopping down sacred groves, which are idolatrous because they assume spirit in nature.” (White 1206). I have quoted this before in one of my comments; however, it is appropriate to reiterate White in this blog post because it is essential to understanding why King creates dichotomies.
Even though dichotomies can create problematic thinking—black vs white, gay vs. straight, them vs us, etc.—it is a useful tool in rhetoric because of its salience and simplicity. King is using rhetoric analysis when he points out that in the “native story the conversational voice tends to highlight the exuberance of the voice but diminishes its authority while the cover voice in the Christian story makes for a formal recitation that creates a sense of veracity.” (23). King is not telling us to believe one story over the other; he is telling us why the Christian story has taken power. It is not the case that one story is more sacred than the other. After all, many indigenous people hold both Christianity and Native stories as sacred. Here, King is analyzing what Aristotle would call logos, the logic of the argument. Later, King points out the ethos, the emotions and character of the audience, when he states that we struggle to believe in the story of Charm because we live in “a predominantly scientific, capitalistic, Judeo-Christian world governed by physical laws, economic imperatives, and spiritual precepts.” (12). As an atheist (in the religious sense of the word), I don’t completely agree with King’s point because Charm’s story starts with a scientific truth about how our earth looked like in its earliest stages: “…the world we know as earth was nothing but water.” (King 10). However, the notion that Charm’s story might be difficult to believe heightens the need for simple rhetoric. The dichotomies make it is easier to compare and contrast the two stories which also makes it easier to understand that the Christian story isn’t necessarily the right one, but the one with more authoritative rhetoric.
When King places the Native story and Christian story in binary opposition, he is not polarizing us vs. them; he is making it possible for the reader to get a sense of someone else’s culture. King mentions that “creation stories are relationships that help to define the nature of the universe and how cultures understand the world in which they exist.” (King 10). The Christian story causes us the view ourselves as detached from the world and better than other creatures. The Native story gives us a sense that we are part of nature and that animals share similar souls to our own. The Native story seems to have a better outcome for the environment, but King doesn’t dismiss the Christian story altogether because we can learn it’s authoritative rhetoric and why it has influenced so many cultures. By contrasting two stories in a way that is easy to understand, he shows us that there are different ways to view our world and that these beliefs affect our behaviour and culture. It doesn’t seem that he is saying one story is better than the other, but that viewing the world from one belief system can normalize a lot of destructive behaviour. After all, “a person who knows only one country knows no countries,” Seymour Lipset.
Works Cited
King, Thomas. The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative. University of Minnesota Press, 2005.
Marks, Gary. “Obituary: Seymour Martin Lipset.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 12 Jan. 2007, www.theguardian.com/news/2007/jan/12/guardianobituaries.usa.
Richards, Daniel. “The Power of (Splitting) Dichotomies.” Daniel T. Richards, 19 Mar. 2017, www.danieltrichards.com/the-power-of-splitting-dichotomies/.
White, Lynn. “The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis.” Science, vol. 155, no. 3767, 1967, pp. 1203-1207.
Hey Nolan,
Thanks for your post; it was really thought-provoking (and your Sound of Music meme was delightful). Your discussion on rhetoric and how it’s used in different ways in each story was really interesting; it’s been a long while since I’ve actively thought about pathos, ethos, and logos and the infamous rhetorical triangle, but the way you laid it out so clearly made so much sense. I agree with you in that I disagree a bit with King when he says that it’s harder for us – raised in the thought-system that we have been – to believe “The Earth Diver” when while reading it, I had the same reaction as you – reading a story where the world started in a state of water and moved to more complex beings/landforms makes so much more sense to my Western-scientifically-trained brain than trying to believe the Genesis version.
I have such a hard time understanding people that can’t see the value in Indigenous creation stories, and ways of knowing, especially today when we’re in a climate change crisis. I think it really illustrates how detrimental holding only one world view can be. I don’t think you need to believe in all of them or any of them, but having the ability to see the relevance and importance of different creation stories and beliefs is essential. Do you think, if “The Earth Diver” story had been told using a more authoritative voice – either in King’s version, or in general (originally), it could alter how people perceive it, or do you think the “Genesis” story has held its footing so well for so many years not because of how it’s told, but because it fits so well into the ideals of society, where the hierarchical view with humans at the top provides us (Euro-western individuals) with the easiest path to “success” (despite the negative effects on the environment and other species, etc.)? It’s kind of a “which came first, the chicken or the egg” situation, but do you have any thoughts?
Thanks so much for your great post!
-Kirsten
Hi Kirsten,
I’m glad that you enjoyed my post and thanks for the great question! If The Earth Diver story was told in a more authoritative voice, it might make a subtle difference in how people perceive it, but it wouldn’t be able to compete with the rhetoric of the Judeo-Christian religions. The reason for this is mostly drawn from my psychology of religion class. Norenzayan’s hypothesis is that cognitive representations of gods as increasingly knowledgeable and punishing, and who sanction violators of interpersonal social norms, foster and sustain the expansion of cooperation towards co-religionist strangers. We can see that this is the case when you look at the rate of growth in various societies with a punishing monotheistic Gods. Many of the variable and other potential causes take a while to get into but if you’re interested, check out, “Big Gods” by Norenzayan. The researchers also made use of experimental designs that found when participants were primed with punishing Gods vs. Rewarding Gods, people were less likely to cheat on games and more likely to be charitable towards those who believed in the same punishing Gods.
Hi Nolan! I had an insight while reading your post about the dichotomy King speaks about regarding authoritative voice vs. the conversational voice. It seems relevant to this course in general—not only in our readings and attempts to understand the contact stories of Indigenous peoples and Europeans, but also in our blog posts. I’m still trying to figure out how academic/authoritative or how conversational/colloquial to be in my answers to these questions, wondering whether one would bear more weight than the other because it is said in a different way. Totally ties into King’s re-telling of Genesis and Charm, which is basically challenging us to question ourselves about why would we assign more truth to one rather than the other. This inquiry into why we believe what we believe is fascinating, and I wonder if it’s easier or harder for you to answer these questions (since you are an atheist in the religious sense of the word), and how that informs your tackling of this subject?
I don’t know if being an Atheist makes it easier or harder for me to answer those questions. I think keeping an open mind to different ways of thinking helps me to understand that value in seemingly contradictory truths. In cultural psych, I have been learning about analytic vs. holistic thinkers, and I think that would probably influence me more than my atheism. Westerners are much more analytical, and I hope to adopt a more holistic way of thinking to see things in different ways. This is kind of unrelated to King, but when When Americans and analytic thinkers encounter two contradictory arguments, they come to view the better argument as even more compelling than when they encounter the same argument by itself. In contrast, when Asian and holistic thinkers encounter two contradictory arguments, they come to view the weaker argument as more compelling than when it is presented by itself.
For example: (Heine 369)
A sociologist who surveyed college students from 100 universities claimed that there is a high correlation among female college students between smoking and being skinny.
A biologist who studied nicotine addiction asserted that heavy doses of nicotine often lead to becoming overweight.
It seems that it a Western and analytic way of thinking to assign one truth over the other while holistic thinkers see things as having multiple truths due to viewing things in how they relate to one another rather than separate categories.
These different ways of thinking can be traced back thousands of years. For instance, ““If you want to shrink something, you must first allow it to expand. If you want to get rid of something, you must first allow it to flourish. If you want to take something, you must first allow it to be given.” (Laso Tzu, 200).” This view not only highlights that reality is in flux but also indicates that opposition truths can be simultaneously accepted. Around the same, Aristotle proposed to the law of contradiction, stating that something can neither be true and untrue.