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hat does it mean to conserve? Across the entire ideological spectrum there is talk of conserving and preserving land, nature, culture, and history. There’s little considered thought about what that means, and all the bitter ironies. Walking through old buildings I feel conflicting impulses. One is what I’d glibly call Goethe’s Feeling, trying to find a real and compelling connection to ancient history among silent architecture—though I’m not in Rome:

Tell me you stones, O speak, you towering palaces!
Streets, say a word! Spirit of this place, are you dumb?
All things are alive in your sacred walls
eternal Ipswich, only for me all’s still.

Chaucer lived in Ipswich. But going to Ipswich today you may experience a local form of Paris Syndrome, as is the case in over-expectant Asian tourists: despair at the dirt and grime of modern Britain, with just a thin haunted shadow of history hiding around dark corners near Betfred and a dozen phone-repair-cum-vape emporiums. Another impulse is conservative, in the older, perhaps better meaning of the word—pastoral, nurturing, rural, wanting to preserve deteriorating architecture and dying nature rather than lower taxes and build a mega pork-and-chicken factory near King’s Lynn, polluting nearby rivers or squashing badgers in my brand-new BMW. It becomes increasingly difficult to feel something; something the heathen me can never call spiritual, in ancient spaces and in pretty landscapes. I want to preserve churches but I don’t want, or need, some comforting myth to make my sentimentality worth more. It’s rude to suggest that only the God-bothering can really have a true and deeper connection with the past, with the stones, with life, as if the intensity of their conceit, so fantastical, maybe approaching delusion, can be an intense gratification and justification for wanting nice things, rather than anything perverse. I don’t need to believe in any elevated metaphysics or theological dogma to recognise a good building and a good story.

Occasionally I do feel something, but it’s more about the prospect of losing things. It would be a deep shame to demolish a thousand-year-old building (disregarding any listed status), in disuse or not, or replace some other landscape, to build an identikit housing estate. This appears very obvious, although I am no so-called nimby. I would very much like the propagation of more housing, and better housing, though there’s a question of not, in Ruskin’s words, producing such “comfortless and unhonoured dwellings”, and it’s insulting to think that we somehow cannot do this; when we are otherwise so abundant and wealthy.

It’s difficult for me to walk far. Illness restricts my ability to wander through forests and picturesque countryside, so any experience of the rolling hills of Suffolk is rarer, more precious, less common or boring. Countryside is worth a lot and is easy to lose. It takes more effort to repair it and sustain it.

Much of the modern world is so quickened, so hastily built up and torn down again in destructive renewal. We often mock Americans for having little history or no old buildings. Americans mock themselves for this; Americans visiting Britain marvel at quaint brick cottages and structures older than nations . . . But America does have history, and has known beauty in the sort of dated pre-modern architecture many of us love: particularly civic architecture. The United States produced some of the grandest and most beautiful train stations to ever exist. They destroyed them. There’s always an irony to what we call conservatism: the historian J. G. A. Pocock asked American conservatives what was it of their culture they wanted to conserve? They do no good job at conserving much at all, and are far better at societal arson and insurrections. America is a land of radical destruction before much else. The most vocal self-proclaimed modern conservatives have no motivation to preserve democracy and the rule of law and instead prefer a radical free-market and devastating, authoritarian, counter-revolutionary violence—all while corruptibly preaching freedom. It brings to mind Samuel Johnson’s bitter indictment: “How is it that the loudest yelps for liberty come from the drivers of Negroes?”

I’ve never been a conservative, in a fairer sense or with any mixture of right-wing demagoguery. It’s well-noted, indeed obvious, that deregulatory capitalism, Friedmanism or Hayekian economies on crack, are antithetical to conservation, conservatism, and the preservation of culture, of local tradition, or nature. A less corporatist variety of conservatism, even anti-capitalist conservatism, may be less destructive but cannot protect life and does more to neuter and impoverish it. Parochial, inflexible defenders of culture do more, in bleak irony, to dull, stagnate, and kill custom and tradition. We can, however, navigate ideas and borrow their elements without subscribing to projects or even to fundamental principles; much like a thief appropriating wealth for better use.

I don’t expect much, but sometimes we need a basic reminding. We have many sentiments, often conflicting, with labels that are always inadequate, and we all dip into the pool of ideas robbing each other. In this way, we can regard certain virtues, practices, values, without the baggage and the burdens of impoverished dogmas. Most people don’t know what they want and give themselves silly names. Ideologies claim virtues they never maintain, and the gulf between ideas and regimes remains unbridgeable.

It might seem peculiar that I’m having this struggle, yet there is a popular sentiment, a decent and compassionate sentiment, to preserve culture and architecture, art, objects, local spaces, living beings, that is definitely not reactionary and cruel or exclusionary. But mean and unsavoury sorts, and righteous ideologies, are so vocal, in a fetishistic way, about the preservation of things that one can mistakenly believe the wish to protect and conserve, and not so callously replace old things, is a nasty or even exclusively right-wing disposition. This mistake is understandable when so many rose-tinted and perverse nostalgists, ahistorical and false recoverers of history, proliferate in modern spaces—and modernity does little to be a good caretaker. Or when opponents of the right care less about antiques . . . Modernity may often hurt us; we make this situation worse if we let others claim dominion over the past. We do ourselves a disservice if we let our opponents monopolise symbols, images, and ideas, let alone practical activities. If a misbehaving conservative says it’s bad to neglect a Norman castle, that doesn’t mean it’s now good to do so. Heritage and history, very obviously, are not exclusively the domain of cultural conservatives—yet we can somehow forget this: we allow them to steal it. More progressive and fairer-minded people are mistaken, in wanting to improve our lot, if they do away with any old thing just because it’s dated, pressing ever-onward with the newfangled and fashionable.

At the risk of snobbery, one can say that poverty and deprivation may impose a particular condition, a ruinous and deprived state where one may not believe in much: judging how they are seen, noting the neglect of their welfare, the distressed state of their immediate environment, and the opacity of political institutions—one may ask: Why should I care? Why would one care for community and culture, let alone a few classical buildings, birds, and musty heritage sites when little care is afforded to you and immediate vices are easier? We can condemn this as callous, and poverty cannot be a blasé excuse for bad behaviour, but is it not understandable, and readily attested to, that a poor state of affairs may lead this way? And who is the author of this state of affairs? We ask a lot of people. Those who demand so much, in the realm of ideas, still maintain a world where waste and cheap clothes matter more than anything so sentimental and quaint as virtue or the conservation of trees.

I want to wear older clothes. Not out of a sense of nostalgic sentimentality, which still might creep in, but because it’s better to maintain an old outfit than wear through new garments like meals. Clothing should not be so wasteful; so effluent. Society should not be, either. If we want to conserve the past, or physical representations of the past, then we need a more equal and judicious present.

The liking of history should not mean cultivating crude and cruel ideas. Such an attachment makes more sense as a reprieve, an escape, a guard against a world where so much may soon be lost in any number of ecological catastrophes or democratic upheavals, often with little hope. Nostalgia for what’s lost forever need not be so obscene. In rare moments we can really feel the past, the stones do speak, and it need not always be so terrible.