Americans have both:

 

  A pluralist society where metanarratives are in conflict.

Just as the Empires of the past have introduced conflicting metanarratives to their people so we have pledged ourselves not only to accept other cultural world views but consider it our democratic and religious obligation to encourage all people to respect and accept all cultural views as worthy of respect and acceptance. This is part of what was referred to as our American Manifest Destiny.     

 

  A metanarrative for the quest that describes the stages an individual goes through on the quest. The quest an individual follows to resolve the conflicts that result from pluralism is a learned response to the experience of those conflicts. We use key words and follow set patterns of investigation that we find as we begin our quest.

 

So what patterns are there for us? Who has set the sequence we follow today in mapping out our quest?

 

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