(Replying to PARENT post)
There seems to be this strange idea that 'culture' means 'has a religious festival' or somesuch. You hear of some traveller lionising a travel destination as being so culturally deep because they happened to visit when a festival was on. Then, because the home country doesn't have that festival or ritual, it's seen as culturally bereft.
There is a ridiculously wide assortment of activities you can get involved in when you're not a scratching at the earth for subsistence - including debating the difference in what 'culture' means with someone on the other side of the world. Whether you're seeing a movie, running a fantasy football league, doling out soup in a soup kitchen, filibustering to stop some random law, fishing through your credit cards for one the plane's entertainment system will accept, chewing the fat with a passerby while sitting on your stoop on a hot night, spending a Saturday doing a gastro-tour of a great vineyard region... pretty much any activity you can think of, right down to submitting your tax forms... these are all culture. The more different kinds of people you throw together, the greater the variety of cultural activities available.
The idea that we are culturally bereft is just plain wrong. We may not have our priorities right with certain aspects of our culture, but we are drowning in culture. I just don't see how culture would be 'deeper' with less interaction between people from the removal of fossil fuels - we had that for human history up until a couple of hundred years ago, and culture was both slow to change and quite unfair, without being any deeper than it is now.
/rant
(Replying to PARENT post)
Damn cyanobacteria thinking unsustainably and killing the planet for everyone else...
(Replying to PARENT post)
But then again maybe not. Maybe we'd never overcome the activation energy for innovation. You can't do true experiments in history.