The enthusiasm was justified, as was much of the enthusiasm for multiculturalism and SBS, even though few people were then (or are now) clear about what multiculturalism means. Embattled politics being what it is in Australia, both the enthusiasm and the vagueness are an irritant to the right which has, in my judgment, failed to see the wood for the trees on these matters.

Only five or six years before my friend told me about Ayers Rock, there was an incident that I recount in A Common Humanity and that still shakes me. It occurred in the late 1960s at Melbourne University. I was a member of the Labour Club, which was then a club of the radical left. Like other members of the club, I was excited by the civil rights movements in the USA and, by the by, its more radical breakaway groups like the Black Panthers. One day a man came from Queensland to speak to the club. He told us that people were emigrating to Queensland from the southern states of the USA disillusioned with life there because of the progress made’ by the civil rights movement. Unable to tolerate the thought let alone the fact that blacks might vote and attend the same schools as whites, they thought Queensland might be more congenial to them. Or so we were told. We were also told that some of the immigrants went out on weekends in four-wheel drives to shoot Aborigines in much the same spirit as they shot kangaroos.

I’m now sure that the story wasn’t true. At the time though, I gave it credence. Maybe. Maybe not, I thought, and the thirty or forty of my fellow students who attended thought the same, I believe. At any rate, no one said, ‘This is unbelievable.’ Yet I didn’t – nor, I think did the other students – bother to find out whether or not it was true.

As I said, the memory of it still shakes me. How was it possible that idealistic young Australian students, sincerely anti racists, should not care whether Aborigines were hunted for sport! What more damaging evidence could there be that we didn’t care than the fact that we didn’t even bother to find out whether it was so? I don’t think one can answer these questions without recourse to the concept of racism. But whatever qualification must be made to the claim that we were sincerely anti racist students, the place to locate the racism that would explain (though not excuse) our astonishing omission, is not, I think, deep in our hearts. It is in some of the institutions of Australian society that made Aborigines morally invisible to most Australians.

That wouldn’t be possible now. But Aborigines are still only partially visible to the moral faculties of many (most?) Australians, even to many who are committed to reconciliation. Sorry Day is an example. It expresses a new aversion to racism that ensures there are not now examples like the one I just recalled. At the same time much of it is marked by a sentimentality that expresses the kind of goodwill that can quickly be eroded by the impatient belief that the Aborigines are asking for too much or showing excessive anger towards the government or (God forbid) to the white community more generally. Remember the tut tutting when Noel Pearson was moved to call members of the Coalition racist scum. ‘Mind your place. Don’t rise above yourself.’ If one denies that that was the tone, one can’t, I think, deny that it wasn’t far from it. Can one fully understand the evil the Aborigines have suffered and be so quickly stirred to indignation about what one take to be their excesses? Can one really understand it and take most of them to be excesses?

Two years ago I gave a public lecture on genocide and the stolen generations at the Australian Catholic University campus in Ballarat. A small number of Kooris were in the audience. During the talk and afterwards during discussion they were sometimes irritable and impatient. Finally one spoke up. He was fed up, he said, with the many distinctions I had been making. Did I know what it felt like to be a victim of genocide? Did I not see that one can speak of these things only if one experienced them? Only Aborigines could speak with real understanding of the genocide committed against them. Did I even know any Aborigines? He finished, by wondering whether I was exploiting their suffering to make a name for myself, writing and lecturing about it.

Anyone who has spoken on platforms with Aborigines, or to audiences where they are present, will know his response is not unusual. People who are not Aborigines will know and perhaps be unnerved by the complex range of feeling – suspicion, pleasure, gratitude, hostility, warmth – Aborigines direct their way. Those feelings look inconsistent only if one presses them towards a resolution. But there is no need to do that. Those many conflicting responses appropriately mirror the situation of most Aborigines in contemporary Australia. They are true to it rather than a sign of a muddle.

I replied to the Koori that I spoke as a citizen – one whose conscience had belatedly been awakened, who wrote on matters of public concern, and who believed he had something to say. Being a philosopher, much of what I speak and write about is of a conceptual kind. I have nothing to contribute to the historical argument. But it is not because I am a philosopher, I went on to say, that I believe the conceptual issues are the most pressing. Though we are far from having an adequate history, though Bringing Them Home makes no claim to being one, and though its finding will surely be disputed, the broad picture is already clear. And the disputes about whether genocide had been committed against the children and their parents are not, for the most part empirical or legal. They are philosophical and moral, enlivened by the question whether a criminal category whose paradigm is the Holocaust, could apply to what was done to the children and their parents, even during the worst periods of the absorption programmes.

I wasn’t sure how he responded. He listened, at first with the same irritation as before, and then more attentively, but I’m sure that he wasn’t convinced. I’m not even confident that he considered that I had given him something to think about. We came, he and I, from worlds that are too far apart to be bridged by a brief and irritable discussion after a public lecture.

To some my response to him may see unnecessarily on the back foot. It’s a matter for argument when one’s shame and guilt make one too defensive. Argument about political correctness is in part about that and it is right that it should be. But there is, I believe, such a thing as the right to speak because of one’s membership of a particular group, a right which is not merely a function of information or insight one may have come by in that way. ‘Who are you to say this?’ is not a question that can rightly be answered by, ‘I’m curious about the matter and like everybody, I have a right to say what I believe is true.’ For the same reason, ‘Who are you to put your nose in our troubles?’, is not answered adequately by, ‘I am a human being, concerned with right and wrong, justice and injustice.’ Even bitter enemies in deadly conflict can (sometimes they do) respect one another, a form of respect that is almost always dependent on (though not entirely based on) contingencies that determine the actual depth of their involvement in the conflict that divides them.

A long tradition has disassociated depth from contingency, but our recent recovery of the important connections between depth of identity and rootedness, and authority and rootedness, has gone some way to correct that. While appeal to our humanity rather than to our local identities is rightly an ultimate moral appeal, by itself it seldom gives one the right to speak or the right to intervene, because it is often insufficient to command the kind of respect necessary for possession of that right.

If a Jew goes to Israel as a volunteer at time of war, a Palestinian may ask him scornfully why he is not prepared to live there, but he is unlikely to ask him why he is there. One can imagine a discussion between them in which both recognise that contingencies of birth and identity have generated moral necessities that have locked both of them in a conflict in which one may kill the other, but in which each may nonetheless respect the other. In some of his writings Amos Oz imagines just such discussions, emulating, I suspect, Albert Camus whose Letters to German Friend were written while he was a member of the French Resistance. One might find the writings of both men a little portentous at times, but that should not get in the way of seeing the importance of what they are doing, of seeing the importance of such imaginary conversations as a means – perhaps an indispensable means – of helping those embroiled in conflict to judge the justice of their cause or its prosecution.

The question, Who has the right to speak, about what, to whom, on whose behalf? inevitably comes up again and again. That it should sometimes come up uneasily, belligerently, neurotically, is hardly surprising given the situations that prompt it. It has not been asked often in Australia in connection with the Aborigines, but that is changing. It shows in a minor way in our embarrassment over not knowing what generic terms to use to describe those whom we murdered and whose lands and children we stole. Unsatisfactory though it is, ‘Aborigine’ strikes me as preferable most of the time to ‘indigenous’ and preferable almost all the time to ‘first nations’. It is interesting that many Aborigines now use ‘blackfella’ and ‘whitefella’, but even if one ignores the fact not only white Australians must think about their attitudes to Aborigines, few who are not Aborigine have the authority to use those terms.

Impatience with fine distinctions can come from unlikely quarters. Last year I gave a lecture on genocide and the stolen generations to a group of lawyers in Sydney. I argued that there could be little doubt that during the period covered by Bringing Them Home, some Australian state governments enacted genocidal policies as these are defined by the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. I also argued that the United Nations’ definition was inadequate, if only because it allowed Bringing Them Home to conclude, quite reasonably insofar as it was guided by the convention, that assimilation policies of the seventies and eighties were also ‘arguably genocidal’. A more serious conception of genocide, I argued – one that is morally alive to the fact that Armenia, the Holocaust, and Rwanda are our paradigms – can be applied to what sometimes happened to the stolen children and their parents. Our thoughts about this, I claimed, have been distorted by the understandable belief that genocide requires murder. That it needn’t, becomes apparent to anyone who believes that the forcible sterilisation of a people for the purpose of their extinguishment as a people would constitute genocide. Accepting that there can be genocide without mass killing does not demean the Holocaust and it will enable us to understand better what it is about the Holocaust that we try to understand by bringing it under the concept of genocide.

During a discussion, a Justice of the Supreme Court who had been listening attentively said something like this (I embellish a little so as to make the point dramatically clear).

I understand why you make these fine distinctions in search of an adequate label. I understand because I’m a lawyer and we lawyers are at home with this way of doing things. But don’t you think that you must proceed differently if you are to convince those who are not already convinced of how long and how deeply the indigenous peoples of this land have suffered. To do that, you will have to move people – like Robert Manne does. Your discussion is too abstract, too dry.

I replied that the word genocide was not a label, that it denoted a concept we had reached for to characterise a relatively novel dimension of our political experience in an effort to bring that experience within the space of a common understanding and that – as Bringing Them Home revealed inadvertently – it is a concept whose moral and logical structure is still unclear to us. Imagine, I suggested, that you are struggling in court with the evidence, with precedents, and complex legal arguments, in an effort to determine whether the person before you is guilty of manslaughter or murder. Imagine now that someone says: ‘Why get so bothered about a label? We’ve seen the blood, we’ve heard the lamentations, and we’ve seen the tears. That’s what matters, not this abstract argument.’ Of course, I put the question to him rhetorically, but in fact many people asked something like it in the two great trials of Nazi criminals – at Nuremberg and in Jerusalem when Eichmann was tried. ‘We’ve seen the corpses piled high, we’ve heard the terrible stories telling how they suffered before they died. What does it matter whether you call the evil done to them mass murder or a crime against humanity?’

Although I was surprised that the question should have been put to me by a Justice of the Supreme Court, I recognised it as a familiar and important one. The Koori in Ballarat was asking the same question. No matter that now stands before the Australian nation is so painfully a matter of the heart while at the same time so urgently in need of a cool and patient head, a head patiently open to the detailed and subtle examination of the concepts we need to understand ourselves and to have clear vision and realistic hopes. Amongst others, they are the concepts with which to explore what is at issue between those who require an apology from the Prime Minister and those who are content with what he is offering at present; those which enable us to judge which crimes are rightly called genocide and those with which to explore what is at issue in talk of self-determination.

I do not, however, want now to succumb to endorsing a sharp distinction between head and heart of a kind that I have been trying to undermine during most of my philosophical life. Understanding here, even of the distinctions that will delineate the structures of the concepts I just mentioned, is understanding in which head and heart must come together. Like all understanding, however, it must rise to the requirements of its subject matter, which sometimes look very abstract indeed.

Much of what we need to think about is often discussed under the heading of collective responsibility. To understand the different ways indigenous and non-indigenous Australians can come together and the different ways we can’t, we need to understand the ways we can call others and be called ourselves to lucid moral responsiveness to our past. If relations are even to be honest, let alone to realise their human potential, we must acknowledge the different ways we should rise to those calls. One would have to be deaf not to hear that in the demands for an apology and more subtly in the ambivalent responses I described earlier.

Outside of academic circles, discussion of collective responsibility has been woeful because of conceptual illiteracy of an elementary kind – about the distinction between shame and guilt for example, or between apologies and expressions of regret. I am conscious that I now sound like a philosopher who believes he is in a position to tell people how to think. Some philosophers do assume that authority and I have often deplored it. Nonetheless we will need to think harder than we have done if we are to get beyond the sterile divisions between left and right that disfigure public discussion in this country. A right-wing intelligentsia – now grouped around Quadrant magazine – has considerable influence on the Coalition and, I suspect, beyond. (Apparently the Prime Minister has become an avid reader of Quadrant since Paddy McGuinness became its editor.) Not all of it members, by any means, are unmoved by the past and present suffering of the Aborigines. If their sympathies are somewhat dulled, it is sometimes because of the embattled nature of much of Australian public intellectual life, in which fine distinctions are treated with disdainful and sometimes explosive impatience. Often, it’s not the suffering and injustice of the past the right denies, it is the claim that we are collectively responsible for it; it’s not attention to the wrongs done to the children but the idea that it could be genocide that angers them (if it’s genocide, Michael Duffy said, then Menzies and Hasluck share the same circle of hell with Hitler and Himmler). It’s not greater participation by Aborigines in the life of the nation they are opposed to, it’s the notion of Aboriginal self-determination that provokes their derision.

The friend who told me that we had given back Ayers Rock meant we gave back what we took from them. Everyone would take him to have meant that and many would think he was right to mean it. Not everyone, of course, as is evident from some of the hostility to Paul Keating’s Redfern speech. ‘We took the traditional lands, committed the murders, took the children’, Keating said, acknowledging the wrongs done to the Aborigines and also that their present miseries are not the result of a natural catastrophe, but largely the effects of those wrongs. He also accepted an obligation to relieve their suffering. That much the present government is prepared to admit and to do, although only intermittently and in ways that almost always muddy the waters. Keating’s ‘we’ – we took the lands, committed the murders, took the children – implies, however, that the obligations he accepted derived from acknowledgement of (or perhaps was an expression of) exactly the kind of collective responsibility that John Howard and many of his ministers reject.

Collective responsibility needn’t mean collective guilt, and more often than not it shouldn’t because one can rationally feel guilty only for what one has done or failed to do. But it should be more than regret, more even than the ‘deep, sincere and sorrowful regret’ John Howard and John Herron say they feel. Regret implies little more than that one wishes that something hadn’t happened. Compassionate Americans, Germans, Danes, Norwegians for example, could feel it about the crimes against the Aborigines. The saintly ones among them might also feel profound sorrow. Clearly, though, they cannot be asked to rise to the responsibilities implied in Paul Keating’s ‘we’.

Paul Kelly has wondered in one of his articles in The Australian whether there really is a significant difference between offering an apology and expressing sincere regret and sorrow, not only for the misery, but also for the injustices suffered by the Aborigines. The answer, as everyone instinctively knows, is that an apology in some way takes responsibility for those injustices. Howard knows that and with a degree of cunning trades on confusion about it, giving the impression that because he now professes profound and sincere regret, he has come a long way, while knowing all the while that the distance between his expression of regret and an apology is as huge as it ever was.

Keating’s ‘we’ is not merely enumerative – not merely one that designates members of a group for purposes of clarification. It’s a ‘we’ of fellowship – the kind people mean when they suffer together or rejoice together, or the kind we mean when we speak of our mortality and intend to refer to more than the mere fact that all human beings die. The ancient Greeks expressed a fellowship of all humankind when, in accents of sorrow and pity, they referred to human beings as ‘The Mortals’. Keating’s ‘we’ is one of national fellowship – or if ‘national’ carries the wrong kinds of political implications, then a fellowship formed by love of country. Citizenship, of itself, falls short of it. An immigrant, recently naturalised, could not fully participate in that fellowship. As a citizen she could accept responsibility (through taxation and other burdens, for example) for alleviating the hardships and present injustices suffered by Aborigines. But she could not feel shame for past crimes and could not sensibly apologise for them. Lacking, so far, historically deep cultural and political ancestry in this country, she lacks the identity forming relations to it that would make both shame and the desire to apologise appropriate.

Those who could honestly respond to Keating’s ‘we’ divide into two groups. Both are attached to their country, are proud of it, and enjoy the celebration of its achievements. One group – the group to which the Prime Minister, Senator Herron, and Peter Reith (amongst others) belong – is proud of Australia, but indignantly rejects all suggestions that Australians should also be ashamed of the past treatment of Aborigines. Such calls to shame, they say, express ‘black armband’ responses to our history. Wishing to be proud without sometimes acknowledging that they should be ashamed, theirs is the corrupt love of country we call jingoism. The other group accepts that shame may be necessary for truthful moral response to the evil in our history – to the fact that is our history.

It is not necessary, as people who go on about black armbands appear to think, to descend into morbid self-abasement or always to walk around with head hung low, or to fear to criticise Aboriginal culture or institutions except with weasel words, in order to be lucidly ashamed of Australia’s treatment of the Aborigines. Or perhaps they just pretend to think it to feed their rhetoric. But if the shame means anything, if it really is lucid, then it will be because one has become answerable to those who were wronged by one’s political ancestors. And that, in turn, will mean something only if one is answerable to what they say in their own voice. It is essential, therefore, to nourish the conditions in which the Aborigines can find their voices and then to listen to them in a spirit of humbled attentiveness.

Howard and his ministers will not do that. That’s why, from the moment they took office, they have stumbled from one insult to the Aborigines to another, genuinely oblivious, it would seem, to their gross insensitivity. Only a miracle could make Howard apologise with an open heart and a clear head. Rather than have a mean-spirited confused apology from him, one that demeans him, the indigenous and non-indigenous communities, and the nation, it is best to wait for another government, or at least another prime minister.

Nor is that humbled, attentive acknowledgement of the wrong done consistent with a demand that seems now to be gaining favour, that the Aborigines should forgive if we apologise. Paul Kelly said in The Australian (5 April 2000) that we should stop talking about apology and talk instead of apology and forgiveness. To my ear he sounded a little fed up because demands of reconciliation seemed to him to be directed increasingly to one side only.

Forgiveness is, I suspect, not the right word to describe the kind of open-heartedness that many people hope from the Aborigines in return for a prime ministerial apology. For one thing, it is characteristically a response to guilt and most Australians are not guilty of things for which they are rightly ashamed. Reconciliation must reach out to those who are ashamed but not guilty as well as to those who are both. For another, it is doubtful whether political leaders or other representatives of political groupings can rightly forgive on behalf of those in their constituency (broadly construed) who were wronged. Could Jewish leaders forgive the German and their allies on behalf of the Jewish victims of Nazi genocide? I don’t say the answer is obvious, but I’m surprised the question has not troubled Aboriginal leaders, the government, and others who have assumed that forgiveness is the appropriate concept.

Be that as it may: because both sides speak of forgiveness, I will too. It will enable me to make my point even more strongly. The non-indigenous community may ask and hope for forgiveness, but it has no right to demand it. There will be no reconciliation unless the Aborigines forgive, but talk of reconciliation as a moral imperative has lulled some people into the lazy thought that if we are prepared to apologise, they should (morally) be prepared to forgive. Even if we knew that the Aborigines will deny us forgiveness, we have apologies and reparation to make, and we should make them unconditionally.

One hears too often nowadays the querulous tone I reluctantly believe I heard in Kelly’s article, and much more of it is, I fear, latent in the body politic. When the prime ministerial apology comes as it will, if not from this Prime Minster then from a later one, then we may hear something like this. ‘We’ve apologised. Settle down. Become good citizens, good Australians. Take your place in the multicultural life of the nation, as the Greeks, Italians and other foreigners have. True we owe you differently from them, and as part of practical reconciliation we will honour what we owe you in education and in health care. But stop this nonsense about treaties and self-determination.’ After the apology, I fear that the humility that should attend the pained acknowledgement of wrong done will no longer inform the spirit with which the government, supported by the electorate, will seek to alleviate the material suffering of the Aborigines. The reason? Because, as I said earlier; most Australians have not fully comprehended the terrible evils done to them.

To come back to the Koori in Ballarat and to try again to capture some of the complexity of our exchange. At a point of tension in it – a point where he and I were both irritated with each other – I told him he couldn’t have it both ways. He couldn’t, I said, invoke – indeed exploit – the profound moral connotations of the concept of genocide and at the same time express impatience with the fine distinctions that are necessary if the concept’s structure – and therefore its political, moral, and legal ramifications – are to be made clear. And necessary too, I continued, if there was to be any chance of meeting the accusation that the application of the concept to what was done to the stolen children was stupid and indecent, an offence to the victims of real genocide, and also to the stolen children insofar as it is assumed they are glad to profit from such a demeaning comparison.

In a generous review of A Common Humanity in The Australian’s Review of Books (April 2000), Martin Krygier says that he wishes the issue of genocide had never been raised in the Australian context. He means I think, that he wishes it had never been raised in connection with the stolen children. The case for its application in other periods of Australian history is, I think, overwhelming and I doubt that Krygier would deny it. He goes on to say that it has, however, been raised in connection with the stolen children and in a way that now requires argument rather than sneers in response. He is right, of course, but I would put the point with a different emphasis. The reason it needs to be discussed seriously has not so much to do with the dialectics of discussion, with the fact that a case has been made and needs to be answered. It needs to be discussed because an element of our political experience seems to require it. If no one had ever raised the issue, we would have to raise it in order to understand ourselves in our history.

We are still a long way from serious discussion of it, I think. If we ever come to it, there will be much anger and pain. Some of it will be the anger and pain we are familiar with, only more so. But there will be a new dimension to it. As I said to the Koori in Ballarat, the concept of genocide is essentially a concept forged to make sense of an element of western political experience. We are learning now that reflection on other experiences – notably those of some of the colonised peoples – will enable us to understand its structure better and thus to understand better even those aspects of the European experiences we were trying to capture with the concept but whose significance was distorted by the horrific mass murder that seemed inseparable from its paradigms. But though reflection on the stolen children will help us to understand genocide, the stolen children themselves have nothing uniquely to contribute to our understanding of the concept. Not them nor Aborigines, nor even, I suspect, indigenous peoples more generally.

The Aborigines have told stories of the crimes they suffered that add up to genocide, and they (and others) will tell more. But the stories and the way they move us, are no substitute for the discursive elaboration of a concept whose essential grammar was set by European political theory in response to European experiences. To put the point another way. The genocidal aspect of the crimes committed against the stolen generations does not show in the suffering the stories make real to us. It was not the genocidal aspect of the stories told in Bringing Them Home that made Kim Beasley and others weep when they first heard them. That is not because the stories that would reveal the genocidal aspect of what was done have yet to be told. At the level of story telling, at the level at which only stories can truly engage our sympathies, move us, and make us weep, Aborigines may have much yet to tell. Perhaps those stories will teach us something new about the human condition. Perhaps you can’t tell some of those stories unless you are an Aborigine. It may even be true that you can’t fully understand them unless you are an Aborigine. But it is not true that the stories that only the Aborigines can tell, or the ones they can tell best, will make us see why the crimes against the stolen generations were sometimes genocide. The claim that the Aborigines have nothing uniquely to contribute to the discussion of genocide committed against them – I mean to the discussion of why it was genocide – will offend many of them, as it did the Koori in my audience at Ballarat. It will also offend some whites.

Genocide is essentially a concept of western political theory. So is the concept of self-determination, but in the latter case the efforts of first nations to be true to the experiences which make them call for self-determination may extend our understanding of political possibilities. The demand for land rights, for example, may merely be part of a demand for equal citizenship that acknowledges their history and the rights that should accrue because of it. But it may be part of a demand for forms of political association hitherto unforeseen.

We do not know – in principle do not know – the form of our future political relations, not at any rate if we remain open to the Aborigines’ call for self-determination. The reason that we don’t know is truly radical. It is not because there are a determinate number of options, but we do not know which we will choose or which will be forced on us. No amount of cogitating – not even if it is done by political theorists of genius – will by itself even map out the theoretical possibilities for us. Our ignorance will not be solved by more facts and more brainpower. We do not yet know the possibilities, partly because it is not just a matter of discovering them, but of creating them. Or better: our conclusions will express what we discover in our living together, imaginatively but soberly responsive to what we can make of the truthful acknowledgement of the past and what it will make of us.

A prime ministerial apology will come one day. When it does, it will be a matter of urgency to struggle against the political inertia and the blandishments of a false realism that will undermine the conditions that would enable indigenous and non-indigenous Australians to explore together the radical possibilities in the ways they might live together in this land. Impatience with the vagueness of appeals to self-determination should gently be turned aside, for as I have tried to suggest, its vagueness is not itself the expression of intractable confusion. Unavoidably, talk of self-determination will do little more in the near future than gesture towards an outcome whose full conceptual character is in principle unforeseeable. In the meantime we should be careful in our use of the first person plural. We should not, for example, assume that the political fellowship in one political community that indigenous and nonindigenous Australians look forward to should be that of equal citizens in the Australian nation. Australia, it must be admitted, is an unlikely place for experimentation in novel forms of political association. That happens successfully, one feels, only in places where there is a relatively sophisticated interest in the kind of conceptual issues that Australians appear to be impatient with. But there is in Australia a different kind of openness that may prove more important. It shows itself in the kind of decency that made multiculturalism such a success on the ground, despite Hanson and her followers and despite the misgiving of influential parts of the intelligentsia. And Fortune can smile on anyone, as Aristotle disposed to note when he contemplated the undeservingly lucky.

I will quote something I wrote in A Common Humanity, not because I think it is so marvellous, but because it makes just the point I now want to make in conclusion and I cannot think of how to put it better. I had been quoting Martin Buber on the nature of conversation. The basic difference between monologue and ‘fully valid conversation’, he said was ‘the otherness, or more concretely, the moment of surprise’.

His point is not merely that we must be open to hearing surprising things. We must be open to being surprised at the many ways we may justly and humanly relate to one another in a spirit of truthful dialogue. It is in conversation, rather than in advance of it, that we discover, never alone but always together, what it means really to listen and what tone may properly be taken. In conversation we discover the many things conversation can be. No one can say what will happen when we fully acknowledge the evil done to the indigenous peoples of this land and when they see and accept that we have acknowledged it. More importantly, no one can say what should happen.