Reply to comment

I was enthralled by the distinction of three types of story telling style this week, used to categorize the progress of stories throughout time. However, I see nothing in the etymology of "foundational" to support Prof. Grobstein's use of the word; therefore, this terminology is very confusing to me. He seems to be using it to mean a story that has a teleology/ direction/ destination. Foundational is certainly an interesting and powerful idea to work with on this subject matter - what kind of fundamental claims do our narratives rely on? - but we need to be precise with our vocabulary to tease out the full force of these concepts.

In this sense, we move from a teleological narrative (creationism/ great chain of being: humans were created, distinct from other animals, to be rulers of the world as our divinely appointed destiny) to a non-teleological narrative (evolution: humans are one species among many, we all evolved from common origins, things are continually changing but we do not know to what end). This reminds me of Daniel Quinn's novel Ishmael, in which the Taker culture (Western society) has abided by the narrative that humans are the end point of evolution and everything in nature is for our use, whereas Leaver culture (indigenous peoples, hunter-gatherers) takes the non-teleological narrative that humans come from the earth and must co-exist harmoniously with the rest of nature to happily live.

Also, I think that all stories are fundamentally narrative, which is to say they give a certain account about the way things are/ how they came to be that way. For this reason, the use of the term "non-narrative" confuses me. The way Prof. Grobstein explained this was that time played a key role in natural science and others areas circa the 1800's; yet, I think that time played a role in the creation narrative as well (belief that the world was created in 7 days; Dr. John Lightfoot's 1859 insistence that “Heaven and earth, center and circumference, were created together, in the same instant, and clouds full of water…this work took place and man was created by the Trinity on the twenty-third of October, 4004 B.C., at nine o’clock in the morning”). The Great Chain of Being narrative may have assumed an eternal timeframe and thus was atemporal, but it still seems to be a narrative nonetheless.

I do not think that Darwin saw humans as the apotheosis of evolution; I do not think that he assumed a teleological progression of events in his narrative. Perhaps the reason that his narrative was so controversial was that it not only demoted humans from being the crowning achievement of nature, but also that it implied shared ancestry with all other organisms, that it revoked the idea of worldwide human manifest destiny, and perhaps also challenged the idea that there is an order to things/ everything happens for a reason. For these reasons, I think the evolution narrative caused many more tremors than something like Newtonian mechanics, which, though it challenged the beliefs of the day, still allowed for the ideas of order, harmony, and reason in the universe (all of which are distinctly human & appeal to the human mind). With evolution as a narrative, we face a stochastic, contingent existence - it conflicts not only with existing stories, but also with comforting human ideas.

"Disclaimer: Evolution is just a theory, creationism is just a story"