While we re having a conversation, there is no story. At the end of history, dialogue is all, history nothing. The end of history is nowhere more apparent than in Western religion. Although not long ago each religion claimed to tell the uniquely true story of the world, today such claims are considered in poor taste. To insist that my religious tradition alone lends meaning to history makes me unfit for dialogue with members of other traditions.
Dialogue is conceived as transcending the particularity of religious history.
But maintenance of this dialogue depends on excluding the basic fact of its own history, which is that this substitution of dialogue for history arose and is still centered in the Christian West . But because the dialogue cannot reflect upon itself as a historical reality in its own right, it cannot function as a Hegelian dialectic progressing toward a new synthesis. The separate histories that enter into our conversation reveal not the truth of the world to which the beliefs and practices give meaning but only that of the beliefs and practices themselves. Although I can tell you their historical source, I cannot claim that my beliefs are truer or my practices better than yours. This mutual tolerance emerges nonetheless in a competitive marketplace where the worse is constantly replaced by the better, the falser by the truer.