Why do we persist with this morbid attachment to heritage and tradition?

I don't want school Nativity plays. And I don't want to take holidays full of gritty sandwiches, dead jellyfish and bad cafés

Just before midday yesterday I took my place high in the west stand of Tottenham Hotspur's White Hart Lane stadium (this isn't a football column, so bear with me). Before the match kicked off, I told my two oldest daughters about a Christmas game that I'd seen some years before, in which Spurs and Southampton had drawn 4-4 – an unusual score – and the actor Warren Mitchell had addressed the crowd at half-time. I've just now looked up the date on the internet. It was Christmas 1980; 22 years ago. In those days most of us stood, and blokes selling peanuts used to patrol the touch-lines, tossing paper bags into the crowd. Twenty-two years. I've been going to matches in this unlovely part of north London for more than two decades.

And now there's talk of Spurs moving to the new Wembley stadium, because the transport and the infrastructure in Tottenham just can't support an expansion of the old ground.

There'll be a protest if the club moves, I should imagine. A group will be set up. The words "heritage", "tradition" and "history" will figure in leaflets and press releases. But I won't join. I'll feel the tug of the familiar, but I won't regret the change, any more than I miss the peanut man. Unless, of course, the new ground is awful and the team plays badly.

The Church of England is right to take the same attitude towards its churches. On Christmas Eve I heard a news item in which Frank Field, the Anglican MP and Church Commissioner, was lamenting the threat to many churches. With attendances still falling, Mr Field said, the number of churches that might soon close could rival the disaster of the Reformation, when abbeys and monasteries all over England were destroyed.

As I listened, I began to have a heretical thought. Was it not, in hindsight, rather a good thing that Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell had been such a pair of vandals? Imagine if we now had to add all those extra huge religious buildings to the list of fabulous structures that our generation is charged with maintaining. Not only would we have the great cathedrals and the thousands of parish churches, but Rievaulx and Hailes would yet stand and demand zillions in public subsidy to keep them going.

It is bad enough trying to stop the Victorian cemeteries from giving up all their ghosts. Our illustrious and supposedly careful ancestors bequeathed to us a set of monuments marking their grandiloquence, but neglected to put aside any money to pay for their upkeep. The living are required to find more cash each year to subsidise the dead. Is that really what we want to do?

A deafening roar of "Yes!" goes up all around. It isn't difficult to find takers for the proposition that virtually anything about the past is better than almost anything about the present – let alone the terrible future. Except maybe (grudging now) for cholera epidemics, public executions and infant mortality.

I recently had a discussion with some very intelligent people from abroad. The subject turned, as most of my conversations these days do, to the subject of Starbucks. One friend, a lovely Arab woman, told me how much she hated this symbol of globalisation, with its homogenous brews. But what, I asked, would she prefer? Without hesitation she said she always loved our village tea-shops with their Laura Ashley prints and the little rituals of teapots, milk jugs and sugar tongs. And Mole and Ratty in the corner eating paste sandwiches.

She couldn't know that Starbucks is a reinvention, after thirty years, of the Lyons Corner Houses where city-dwellers met between the wars. They were much missed by those who didn't like the smoke and sour smell of pubs, and now they have returned. She may have forgotten that, for a hundred years, you just couldn't get a potable cup of coffee in the capital. And she probably wouldn't realise that many of us feel as welcome in an Olde Englishe Tea Shoppe as a Jehovah's Witness at a bar-mitzvah.

The tea-shop is largely an invented tradition, no more authentic than a chain coffee-house. But somehow its scale and prettiness speaks to that love of quaintness that seems to dominate aesthetics now. Many of the people I meet would really like to live in the centrefold of the Past Times catalogue, surrounded by their Stilton and cranberry spoons. (This year Past Times had a section on the "Byzantine Christmas". I have one of those every year.)

Just over a week ago I was in Tokyo. The Allied fire-bombing of 1945 destroyed just about the entire city, which was made of wood. Hardly a single building survives from before the war. All around were the trappings of Christmas. Light bulbs hung from the few trees, and stores and houses were covered in Christmas trees, Santas, Christmas bells, reindeers, sacks and elves. Everything except baby Jesus and his seasonal entourage of wise men, donkeys and shepherds.

The main religion of Japan is Shintoism, but Confucianism and Buddhism also contend. So the new Christmas festival has absolutely no religious significance for the Japanese. None. It is like our Christmas, but with the ostensible reason for it being held simply absent. The Japanese liked the idea of it, it fell at the right time of the year, so they nabbed it as their main family present-giving festival. Incidentally there are 173 branches of Starbucks in central Tokyo.

Of course, this violates our notion of Japanese culture. Where are the elaborate tea ceremonies? Where are the geishas? Where are the white-clad Shinto priests carrying their large phalli? Still there but, as ever, too expensive and too exclusive for most Japanese people. Popular culture has swept past them. And has created, in Tokyo, one of the most extraordinary and fascinating cities on the face of the globe. You don't go there and regret what has past.

Me, I don't want to go back. I don't want to take holidays full of gritty sandwiches, dead jellyfish and bad cafés. I don't want peanuts. I don't want primary schools to put on Nativity plays. I don't want to spend a fortune keeping open churches that no one goes to. I thank the stars past civilisations didn't spend their energies conserving their heritages at the expense of their own dynamism. If they had, there would have been no Colosseum, no Parisian boulevards, no Heathrow airport and no Trans-Siberian railway.

It's bleeding obvious, but I'll say it anyway, that history is not heritage. And a living community is not enhanced by a pedantic struggle to preserve anything that is older than the coming thing. Look around. You can see an almost morbid attachment to heritage, and still a flimsy understanding of history. Tradition is invoked incessantly as a kind of incantation against change, whether it be in the National Health Service or in the Church. We should treat all this with suspicion.

PS. As I finished this piece – entitled "Tradition" – and hit the "Save" button on the computer, a pop-up message appeared. It's now asking me whether I wish to save all the changes that have been made to Tradition? I sure do.

d.aaronovitch@independent.co.uk