In my culture, everybody simply takes for granted the existence of a larger context culture that exists to foster communication, cooperation, conversation, compromise, and so on and so forth. It’s understood that this context culture emerged over the course of long, hard millennia of trial and error, with lots of death and suffering and war and outrage along the way, and that, while it’s far from perfect, it’s absolutely critical to the safety and success that those of us currently living in the developed, modern world rely upon and enjoy.

(For instance, the founding fathers of America were certainly aware of the flaws in the concept of religious freedom, but they rightly recognized that those flaws were vastly less terrible than the history of war and persecution and oppression that came from attempts to constrain how people worship.)

It’s understood that attempts to change this context culture are fraught with risk, and that sometimes even shining too bright of a light on its faults and failings can be a mistake. This is because, in any given room of 100 people, at least some will misunderstand a claim of “some part of this is bad” to mean “this whole thing is bad.” And of those, some will go on to virtuously attempt to tear down the whole thing, not realizing that they’re digging away at the foundation that lets us have any sort of civilization at all.

(To continue the religious freedom example, it’s often not clear to a young idealist why even saying the sentence “hey, is religious freedom actually the right way to go?” out loud in a public forum might be treated as a risky or dangerous act, especially given other cornerstones of our context culture like the enshrined freedom of personal expression. But in fact the sort of unofficial social pressure that is often brought to bear to discourage such expressions is an important part of the context culture’s immune system. Turns out that such sentences are often a prelude to atrocity, and even when they aren’t, it turns out that it’s reasonable for people to experience a kind of background elevated stress in response to hearing them, and even when it’s not reasonable, turns out some people will anyway, with corresponding downstream effects, and that wishing this weren’t the case or talking about how it shouldn’t be the case doesn’t actually fix it, and that much of the time we’d rather keep on quietly and imperfectly cooperating than engage with or tolerate a literally endless series of erosive complaints and suggestions.)

Thus, it’s known and acknowledged (in my culture) that all of the expressions below are things which may not be possible in the broader context culture. They are things which may be negotiated away in the service of building a world that accommodates more people. They are things which may occasionally be sacrificed, for the sake of collaboration across cultural lines. They are things which it is easy to find oneself arguing for with language that implies that disagreement is tantamount to defection—that one is either with you, and on the side of goodness and rightness, or on the other side—and in my culture we take the stance that letting oneself get away with that kind of slippery narrativemancy is a meaningful transgression against the larger context culture that lets us all live side by side in relative peace.

And so, to the extent that we want to continue cooperating with people of other cultures (i.e. to the extent that there is a diplomatic summit going on that you want to be a part of and are willing to make tradeoffs to stay a part of), people in my culture acknowledge that it is important to be careful, and to be charitable, and to prepare for one’s care and charity to be insufficient, and to be wary of poking holes in the social fabric, and to be ready to repair those holes that will inevitably accidentally be poked, and to—when writing an essay such as this one—take pains to draw a bright and solid line between “this is how it is in my home culture” and “this is a bid that the overall context culture shift in my direction,” and to not immediately dismiss a claim that we did not draw that line brightly and solidly enough.

Another way to put this is that, in my culture, if you want to engage in an act of civil disobedience in order to change the culture around you, it’s important that you at least stick around and let them arrest you and put you in jail. Otherwise (so say my cultural norms) you won’t be interpreted as trying to cooperatively influence that context culture, but rather as trying to outright undermine it and replace it with your own.

(Which is sometimes justified, to be clear. Sometimes you are trying to break the context culture, because the context culture is rounding up and murdering Jews and you symbolically going to jail won’t actually accomplish anything. The point is not that you should always cooperate with the context culture, but that you can’t have your cake and eat it too—you can either cooperate with it or break from it, and you should pick.)

(It’s worth noting that these points are so obvious in my culture that the first draft of this essay excluded them entirely, and my friends had to remind me to make them explicit. I just took it for granted that the rest of the post would be interpreted in that light, which is not at all obvious to people in cultures even only just a little bit different from mine.)