Peter, I would consider morality to be an aspect of culture, to the extent that it applies to specific questions. I want to avoid equivocating here: questions of morality like consequentialism vs. deontology aren’t aspects of culture, but accepted moral stances like ‘homosexuality is acceptable/unacceptable’ are part of culture: they are part of the basic assumptions and expectations for how others will behave. As the assumptions erode, they also become a part of culture as a signaling mechanism: people identify with and express moral beliefs to signal membership in a cultural group.
I think of culture as an emergent property of a group, rather than something an individual has. An individual in isolation does not possess a culture, because culture operates in the interactions between individuals; without others, there’s no expectation about how others will act or beliefs about how others will understand my actions.
I suspect you’re right about alienation, and it’s probably driven by the increased culture flow leading to more violations of social expectation, more feeling like one’s own actions are misunderstood, less identity with those around us. Probably alienation is a feeling we’ve carried with us from our evolutionary history, where isolation was as good as death, so feeling disconnected from those around you was an incredibly vulnerable feeling. Depression is probably an evolved response, a way of being submissive to the group in order to regain full membership.
Tom, I agree that there is a kind of perfect storm of social change going on. And the forces you identify all lead to rapid cultural change: population by increasing physical proximity (lowering impedance), technology by connection people who had been physically separated (lowering impedance), economics by providing a new path for cultural transmission (lowering impedenace).
But, while I agree “disintegrating spiritual considerations” is a strong force in its own right, I think it’s also an effect of rapid cultural change: as a person’s ‘tribe’ starts to include people of different spiritual perspectives, it becomes more difficult to stay connected to a spiritual tradition. In my description from the OP, this would seem to be a part of the feedback loop of social topology: as interaction between cultures increases, each culture’ institutions are weakened, which further weakens the connections within those cultures that were supported by those institutions, which increases interaction between culture and further weakens institutions. In the past, this wasn’t as big a problem, because impedance-lowering events were one-offs, and when old institutions died they were replaced with new institutions that had time to solidify and provide a cultural anchor. Now, the social topology is so turbulent that it’s not clear that a permanent cultural institution will be able to develop sufficiently to stabilize a culture around it.