Mature Cultural Desire
A common immature attitude to desire is to assume that you are entitled to what you passionately desire, and to then cry if you don’t get it, to pressure others to give it to you. If you still don’t get it, a common response is to then declare that you’ve given up on the entire category, and just don’t care anymore.
For example, you fall in love with someone who rejects you, and then declare you are done with love, and will just live alone. Or you want a career as an actor, but then fail there, and so declare that jobs don’t matter, they are just a paycheck. Or you try to elect socialist utopian, who then betrays your hopes, so you decide it’s all corrupt, and you might as well elect partisans on your side.
A more mature stance, adopted by the wiser and more experienced, is to admit that you care a lot, but even so you can’t always get your favorite outcomes. Thus you must search carefully for the best feasible options. (LLMs confirm this overall story: 1,2,3.)
Regarding culture, the most common attitude I see is naive entitlement. Such folks fully embraced the aesthetic and moral views of their childhood, schools, associates, and entertainment sources. They see the views of folks from other times and places as just wrong, and expect history to prove their judgements right. They are typically disappointed when later generations reject many of their cultural truths.
The second most common attitude I see is among folks who have come to realize that cultures change greatly over time, and that the reasons they were given to embrace their local cultures don’t really stand up to scrutiny. In response to evidence that their culture is likely to decay and be replaced by very different ones, such folks often express indifference. They don’t care much which cultures win in the long run.
These both seem, to me, immature stances on cultures. A more mature stance is to admit that the future won’t preserve your culture by default, and that in fact it might not preserve very much of it. But then to ask what you most value in your culture, and to search for ways to preserve those best features. Even if you maybe can’t save much.
Folks with a mature stance on cultural desire are ready to help me think about how to fix cultural drift.
This still does not solve the problem of what anybody's culture really "is". What Is MY culture? I seriously don't know how to call it, I am way too cosmopolitan / globalised for this. There is even a word for it: "Third Culture Kid". Any mention of culture or nation makes my hair stand on my back. I know what cultural elements I personally cherish but they can't be combined into a set that I could explain to anyone else. The mature attitude towards culture would simply be, for me, to not worry too much about giving things names and to keep things that work. At least, temporarily.
Regarding the second attitude, expressed indifference is often just a defense mechanism against the intuition that our cherished values lack adaptive fitness.
I doubt that it's true apathy.