Promising so much to so many, heritage is bound to disappoint. Its benefits often come at heavy cost. Hence it generates abuse along with applause. Rancorous criticism is rife. Critics assail heritage as the enemy of truth, lethal to authentic tradition. Popular taste, fickle and readily swayed, is felt to strip hallowed ideas and icons of enduring worth. Instead of deep and durable roots, what we get is instant and ephemeral, even newborn. Detractors find dismaying the very notion of heritage in the making.

Heritage is vilified as selfish and chauvinist, nostalgic and escapist, trivial and sterile, ignorant and anachronistic. Intricacy is simplified, the diverse made uniform, the exotic turned insipid. Shallow and mendacious, heritage spawns avarice and xenophobia. Assuring its possessors of their unique merits, heritage foments vainglory. The roots it reveres are too good to be true: in a heritage home nothing is tawdry or misplaced; in a heritage lineage all ancestors are engaging if not eminent; in a heritage landscape it never rains (except for desert-dwelling Navajo Indians, for whom “back then everything was in harmony and it rained all the time”). Heritage chronicles strew tales of heroism and sacrifice along a tapestry of steady progress.

Heritage is held to fossilize, to preclude ambivalence, to tolerate no doubts. “The true product of the heritage-industry is entropy; history is over, nothing more is to be done.” Robert Hewison echoes Nietzsche in warning that fevered nostalgia precludes present action. Turning a blind eye to past turmoil, leaching out past distress and bewilderment, heritage is blamed for stifling enterprise. The penchant for patrimony litters the world with legacies of outworn junk.