"Perhaps what our culture lacks, in the end, is the ability to understand itself."
Unfortunately I think this is very true.
I'm not sure but I think our liberal thinking became money thinking. And when a lot of decisions are based on money the human factor is lost. Then it becomes hard to understand what our culture is about.
A small example is the way we build. A lot of buildings are made cheap, for status, and so on. This alienates us because we as humans don't fit in. But it can be hard to tell why we got the feeling we don't fit in. The ability to understand is lost.