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?

I couldn’t quite put a finger on what I was irritated at after having read King’s take on the Native creation story, “The Earth Diver” and the Christian creation story, “Genesis”, but I think I’ve finally figured out what bugged me so much. It was how he dumbed down both versions and pinned them side by side for comparison. There’s so much more beyond “Genesis” that Christianity has to offer and there are so many positive things one can take away from the many stories found in the bible. Christianity isn’t solely all about “Genesis”… Noah’s Ark? Crucifixion and Resurrection of Christ? There’s a lot of good morales to be taken out of such stories. Selflessness especially.

I do agree with King that maybe the world would be a better place if there were only one story that started with chaos and moved towards harmony, like “The Earth Diver”. It helps when everyone believes in a single cause; the human experience would be a lot more unified, collective, and orderly. But unfortunately, that’s not the case.

Obviously King creates the dichotomy between “Genesis” and “The Earth Diver” to compare the two. It helps him get his point across. As much as he pokes at the Christian doctrine for having the binary of good and evil play such a large role in its teachings, he creates the very same binary when he implies that one story is better, or good, (“The Earth Diver”), while the other is bad (“Genesis”).

I think King’s use of dichotomies and binary thinking isn’t as problematic as the question seems to imply. I believe that it’s simply in our nature to categorize things and people, think in binary, and create dichotomies; Lisa MP Munoz, the public information officer for the Cognitive Neuroscience Society and the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, in her 2014 blog post “We See Race – and Create Social Categories – Quickly” discusses exactly this, but in relation to race. Munoz reports that “our brains recognize race and categorize social groups” into “stereotypic and prejudicial associations”. In other words, when we see or meet someone, we sort them into their racial category and the stereotypical and prejudicial assumptions attached to those categories are then applied to the person. This is also called the social identity theory and the process goes as social categorization, social identification, and finally, social comparison. We categorize things/people so we can identify and learn about it/them, then we compare in order to see what is good/bad, better/worse, etc. The same thing can be said about what King is trying to do. He believes that if the world got off to a story about cooperation instead of competition, it would be a better place, but the only way he can make such a bold claim is the create the dichotomy between cooperation and competition. By creating this dichotomy, he can explain why one story is good and the other is bad, or why one is better than the other. We wouldn’t know what bad meant if we had no sense of good, and vice-versa.

Works Cited

McLeod, Saul. “Social Identity Theory.” Simply Psychology. Simply Psychology, 2008. Web. 9 Jul 2015.

Munoz, Lisa MP.  “We See Race – and Create Social Categories – Quickly.” Cognitive Neuroscience Society. Cognitive Neuroscience Society, 15 Mar 2014. Web. 9 Jul 2015.