The entire Bible is a grand-narrative of history. Biblical history starts with the Creation to the time of Jesus. But it does not stop there - it also offers a view of the end of things, the grand finale (Christian Eschatology).
The grand-narrative or meta-narrative of the Bible goes as follows:
Since the crucifixion of Jesus, we are in a long, extended period in stage 7.
The story has a vision of the ending. The vision is 8. For this vision to be realized, spreading the news of the king has to be complete. That is the mission of the Church. Christian Zionists are those who believe that Christ will return only after man fulfills his side of the bargain in the Bible, which is that man must restore the Nation of Israel to its original state. Many of the most powerful political leaders of the US believe in this doctrine.
Any variations to world history that sway us away from this vision is a distraction that delays the return of the king.
West has championed the cause of Christianity from the beginning. They have taken it upon themselves to champion the spreading of the news, the mission of the Church. Western history and Biblical narratives coincide here.
While the West has had traditions (Modernism, Postmodernism) that challenged the Biblical narrative, the deeper Western undercurrent is what is paving the way for the play-out of the rest of the vision for the Grand Narrative.
What causes such exclusivity, such intolerance in the Western Grand Narrative?
We now have the answer.
The faith that feeds the exclusivity, the intolerance, the incessant push to convert the entire world to Christianity is the continuation of the Grand Narrative towards the vision is the promise of the second coming of the king.
In the Western Judeo-Christian Grand Narrative, variations caused by other cultures, traditions, and civilizations are a distraction from the vision. No doubt, the Western Grand Narrative is so demeaning to everything that is non-Western and non-Christian.
What about Dharmic knowledge or Dharmic traditions?
What is the place for Dharmic knowledge or Dharmic traditions in the Western Grand Narrative?
Only as expedients to the Western Judeo-Christian Grand Narrative.
Dharmic traditions and knowledge that:
- do not fit the Western Judeo-Christian Grand Narrative will be vilified, relentlessly impugned, and maligned.
- fit the Western Judeo-Christian Grand Narrative will be secularized, separated from its narrative, and then subsumed.
Tiger-and-Deer Grand Narrative of the clash of civilizations
Rajiv Malhotra aptly describes the situation with his tiger digesting the deer metaphor.
- Western Judeo-Christian Grand Narrative is the tiger.
- Dharmic tradition is the deer.
- Tiger eats the deer, absorb the nutrients, and expunges as excrement what does not enrich the tiger.
- Tiger grows whereas nothing remains of for the deer.
- This story has nothing to do with choosing better outcomes among possibilities. The story is also silent on whether the world is a better place if both tiger and deer respect and live their lives. Story has to do with the only thing that the tiger wants to do with the deer.Tiger is an exclusivist. It wants to survive and it will not let the deer survive.
As Rajiv Malhotra writes:
I use the metaphors of “tiger” and “deer” to illustrate the process of what I call the “digestion” of one culture by another, carried out under the guise of a desire to assimilate, reduce differences and assert sameness. The key point being made is that the digested culture disappears. This digestion is analogous to the food consumed by a host, in that what is useful gets reformulated into the host’s body, while that which doesn’t quite fit the host’s structure is eliminated as waste.
Just as the tiger, a predator, would, the West, a dominant and aggressive culture dismembers the weaker one – the deer – into parts from which it picks and chooses pieces that it wants to appropriate; the appropriated elements get mapped onto the language and social structures of the dominant civilization’s own history and paradigms, leaving little if any trace of the links to the source tradition. The civilization that was thus “mined” and consumed gets depleted of its cultural and social capital, because the appropriated elements are then shown to be disconnected from and even in conflict with the source civilization. Finally, the vanquished prey – the deer – enters the proverbial museum as yet another dead creature (i.e. a dead culture), ceasing to pose a threat to the dominant one.
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