What then, are the implications for liberalism, religions, and civil society in the future? The most important thing to be learned from this Tocquevillian on narratives is that people long for a particular sense of identity within a universal order. The history of equality has led them towards a universal order of equality that was to provide them with space for their own particular narrative, which, in Appiah's terms, is basically a twist on a meta-narrative, a twist that provides a particular 'entrance' into the larger order of things.
    The failure of the liberal narrative today  The order of the liberal narrative has failed in providing that particular entrance to the mass of people. The abstraction of human beings as autonomous individuals (the thin conception of the person) was politically useful. As a narrative which's institutions and habits generate a self-perception of people that is ultimately dissatisfying , it fails to address human beings in their totality. Liberalism can only hold ground if it becomes more cautious and self-conscious when it imposes its demands unto other realms. It would also benefit from a sensitivity to sociology, and to the narrative of republicanism, thus enriching the abstract ideas of individual rights with practices and habits without which it cannot sustain itself. Liberalism should seek to assume the role of a moderator in the sense that it  steps in when needed, but lets room in the public sphere for ‘good‘ projects that oppose the current understanding of liberalism as a ‘right’ project. In other words, liberalism must admit that it is a good, contingent and universal project itself, rather than assuming the arrogance of some "free-standing conception of justice" taking priority over particular narratives.
    Democracy, Liberalism, Republicanism  Democracy and its basic idea of equality in public participation, relies heavily on liberalism and republican (or communitarian) ideas. It must seek to etch itself into the public mind by providing many different democratic practices, undogmatically redefining what equality in participation means. Feminist writers have made valuable suggestions,  and the local encounter may be another worthwhile field of work and practice.
    Religions must make a gentle comeback. Their strength in a democratic world lies within, not without. By this I mean that service to their members should be their primary concern, not expansion into other spheres, or defeat of other religious orders.
    A civil society would be the place where the order of a liberal democracy and the different religious orders (and all others which he have not talked about) would attempt to find the common ground of which Vaclav Havel spoke. Democratic institutions and practices would temper religious zeal. Religion would temper shallow democratic restlessness. Both orders, the one of a liberal democracy, and the religious orders, will have to learn to adapt to one another, in essence arranging their respective narratives to one another, gently transforming one another, while also gently insisting on their right and space. As Sandel has suggested, "weaving" the web of narratives into meta-narratives, and arranging meta-narratives with one another by linking them at decisive points is not an easy matter, and the unity in narratives which exemplifies the ‘authenticity’ thereby expressed, may be hard to achieve. Maybe it will not be gentle at all. It will only be gentle, or tempered in zeal, if we are aware of the (good and contingent) meta-project of arranging narratives.
    A new understanding of the human task  To this end, our new understanding of the common human task must be aware of its contingency. The best way to link meta-narratives, or to weave narratives into one another may be to be aware of the common questions that lead to different answers, as my model above suggests. On the plain green meadows of democracy, we must all learn to be aware again of what I call "the question of the open sky": that we all try to establish an order between the open plane of our particular existence, and the universal silent yawn above that asks us the question of meaning in the face of its infinity. The narrative of this new understanding of the importance of open questions - rather than of rational answers - would entail that no one can possibly come up with a more justified answer than another human being. All attempts to come to term with that question of the open sky - as it details itself in countless different narratives of (moral, religious, scientific, political and / or cultural) orders of things -, are equally justified, provided that they leave room for other answers. That decisive proviso will be an important contribution of liberalism.
    Change and Compromise  I am not pleading to eternally uphold certain doctrines, but I am not calling for the destruction of narratives either. If people seek their particularity to be addressed in narratives, then changing circumstances will demand that traditional narratives pose new questions and give new answers, and are rewritten. Change is inevitable - change in reality leading to change in the narratives leading to change in the construction of reality - it is an endless circle. Democratic habit will still lead us toward a certain kind of equality, and all narratives will have to compromise. It is a process that has lost the enlightened confidence that we are all striving towards a universal rational civilization with one rational morality. The world will always, and necessarily so, remain fractured. This insight should rob the Western world of much of its unifying missionary spirit. My proposal is a procedural arrangement of a never-ending process that calls for learned people to arrange their orders, and to be attentive in that process to the mechanisms of narrative and institutions, particularity and universalism, political practice and private truths. What I have laid out could be the new meta-narrative of a refined liberalism, a liberalism that still focuses on individual self-actualization, but, by conceptualizing individuals as story-telling beings in relation to others, and in the context of orders and a particular situation as well as in the context of the universal perception of things. Politically, we must enable people to tell their narratives (together with others if necessary), and enable them to do justice to the performative function of their narrative - but we must insist that these narratives do not entail totalitarian practices.
    How do we assume the humility that allows for questions? Post-modernity may serve us as a light as to what modernity, the replacement of a foundation beyond human beings, has done to earth and existence. The postmodern critique of rational and secular modernity as arrogant and misguided must lead us to a new humility. Other than that, let us learn humility from whichever narrative it comes from.
    Truth will be a puzzle, pieced together and processed within the framework of liberal democratic institutions. This habit-producing framework of non-violence is the heritage of liberalism as we move towards the millennium, ever more aware of our failures and the futility of our many human-centered efforts.  As the sections of the Talmud end: now, go and study.