Civilizational context is the term that keeps coming to my mind, after a few years in lands that used to be called second world, and as I now attempt to assemble a semblance of existence back in the greed-fueled, entitled city of animal-spirits-of-the-market at the center of my own country.
It is difficult to express, but in wandering the old brutalist apartment complexes and city centers, towering buildings often unremarkable for anything other than the possibility of housing a large library of paperback philosophy in the spacious, bare rooms, along with a strong table or two, the context of the social encounter is the civilization of the country -- adopting the German division of civilization and culture, this social sense is rooted not in the primitive strength of culture, but in the trust engendered by discrete civilized encounters. The fact that you politely request a cup of coffee is interlinked with the assurance that you are among people of a certain social conscience. These are, if not academicians, at least academic citizens. Neighbors and familiars of the Platonic gardens.
The difficulty of my position, and I felt this keenly when I was there, is that some of the people in these countries are quite legitimately pining for the way of life in my own country, perhaps after a lifetime of polite requests for coffee. (Much of this likely has to do with the specific region, southern Europe, the geographical Balkans and the few countries to the north customarily included in the clique. I would likely have come away from Warsaw, Prague, or Gdansk with a different sense.) And I am at odds with a few things here.
When the funding (menial academic work compensated at rates very favorable to the employers) vanished, I did the conservative thing and left at the point beyond which I couldn't guarantee that, barring a change in circumstance, I'd be able to make it back to the country where I could go to ground if necessary without undue risk of death. (Hospitals in that part of the world don't work on the Medicare bare-minimum model.) I held out and tried to change the reckonings of the fates as long as I could, but didn't risk it all, which was wise.
And as close as I was to cultural word of all of these places, the music, theatre, opera ($5 tickets enabled me to keep certain candles lit that otherwise would have been lost for lack of fuel or excess of wind in those years) -- despite this proximity, I was unquestionably, and quite rightly, the observer -- as I had neither the languages nor the understanding of what, in its most basic sense, the culture might have been trying to do with that language. So astute criticism was the best thing that could have been hoped for.
And now I'm back in my own country, a place that might seem to folks overseas like a meritocracy, but on closer inspection and long acquaintance reveals itself to be a complicated mix of powerful networks, in which, if you offend the great and the good among them, things can get very difficult indeed.
So I do think of these concrete apartments with ample room for adequate paperback libraries of philosophy and history (though the discounted agitprop texts of the past might have made the people less enthusiastic about this, and perhaps a bit book-averse); and I think of these old theatres and music venues (though the comprehensive rejection of the longstanding acting pedagogy (some time before the political revolutions) does make for some anodyne evenings); and I do think of these coffeehouses (though the politics and the stuffy air meant I almost invariably opted for a Western-style chain).
It wasn't utopia, but it was a chance to wander among some civilized folks for a bit, and work, and think --before returning to the danger and the possibilities of the groundless abyss hereabouts. If I had my druthers at the moment, I might want to stage a Shakespeare in Sarajevo, or vanish into the cheap seats of the symphony in Belgrade with a good book and the Dvorak. Or an evening at a municipal theatre in Bucharest, puzzling out the strange play in another language. But these are impulses, not ambitions. Ambition is thought to come, via ambulare, from ancient politicians who would walk about canvassing support. Offering the people ideas, and attempting to understand the nature of the people.
One can do that sort of thing when not fighting for basic survival in the more market-driven and capricious, and sometimes corrupt, world.
But, like the Sophist teachers, I am a foreigner, and for all my knowledge, not eligible for office in the gardens of the academy. So I must only teach.