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If we don't allow this process to continue, the world will stall and come to a standstill. And that's why, to get to the point, I'm fed up with car manufacturers shamelessly aping their heritage.

We've had the Mustang and the GT, now there's talk of a faux Lancia Fulvia. Last month's mag featured the 'new' Dodge Challenger and that proposed Lambo Miura pastiche. And so it goes on.

And I don't think they look quite right. The problem is that the original cars of the Seventies were designed within the constraints of Seventies' engineering, legislation and manufacturing science, and these things informed the look of the age.

Today, the rules are different, and sit slightly clumsily with old ideas about shape and form. The new Miura looks pretty good, but I bet, if you stand them side by side, the original will look better. The same goes for the rest of them, even the Ford GT.

What's more, we cannot view the new Miura in the way people saw the original, because then it was something new. I suspect a lot of people disapproved of it too, but that is what makes it look so good now. The shape of the thing has survived the brutal process of historical selection described above, because it was seen to be right.

For the same reason, it is pointless to attempt a historically accurate performance of some 18th-century music.

Yes, you can dig out the old instruments, which will sound different from the ones we know, and you can play them in accordance with the stylistic fashions of the time. But we don't have 18th-century ears, so we cannot possibly hear it as the original audience would.

How are these shameless retro cars coming about? Why are the bosses of car companies not saying to their designers, "Oi, you charlatan, we've had that one before. Come up with something new." I think I know why, and I think it's our fault.

Bullish people embrace bullish things. We think sturdy Victorian suburbs are wonderful, but forget that the Victorians were modernists who swept acres of old stuff aside.

If we need a new building in a Victorian area of London, everyone campaigns for something 'in keeping'. What would be 'in keeping' is something utterly modern, which we can knock down if it turns out to be no good.

Our obsession with the past is a sign of timidity, then. Look what it's done to Jaguar. It is impossible to come up with a modern Jag without breaking entirely with the current styling traditions, because they are all locked in the 1960s. People are complaining that the new XK 'doesn't look like a Jaguar'. About time it didn't, I say.

I met a top car designer the other day - never mind who, he was a bit pissed - and he confirmed something that I've long suspected. That our reluctance to embrace the contemporary works its way through fatuous marketing research to management, who then stamp on the creative process that drives the shape of cars forwards.

In the future, we will go to classic car shows and swoon over the BMW 6-Series and the Renault Vel Satis, not a remake of a Sixties icon. Apart from anything else, the original will still be there to show us how it really was.

Old cars are great, and the past is fascinating. But it belongs in the past. Be modern, or there won't be any history in the future.