Embracing the Decline, pt.3

Collapse Doesn't Discriminate

Like a lot of university-educated males of my generation, I was always a big fan of British stand-up comic Stewart Lee. His deadpan, understated delivery and subtle, cerebral style, in which the punchline would be inferred rather than spelled out, had an enormous impact on my sense of humour. He began his career in a double-act with Richard Herring, another wry and literary comedian, and I have fond memories of watching the duo’s 1990s TV series Fist of Fun and This Morning With Richard Not Judy with my older brother. Some of the humour is inevitably dated - the ‘Jesus and His Disciples’ sketches might have seemed edgy at the time, but that sort of atheist posturing just seems a bit Reddity now - but even those moments have their charm, and the utterly bizarre Simon Quinlank (portrayed by Kevin Eldon) remains one of my favourite comedy characters.

After parting ways with Herring, Lee has settled more and more within the persona of, as he put it, “a kind of frustrated, bitter, politically-correct middle-aged liberal”. In this role, he applies his acerbic, self-reflexive sensibility to the bugbears of this demographic: Brexit voters, taxi drivers, American comedians, Top Gear presenters. He scoffs at notions of 'woke' censorship, and adopts the role of a permanent outsider filled with impotent rage against the forces of conservatism and bigotry, from the modest platforms granted to him by marginalised news outlets like the BBC and the Guardian. His self-deprecating pessimism serves as a counterweight to his seething contempt, and his ornate deconstructions of his own comedic persona and technique contextualise the (often class-based) snobbery as just being “part of the act”:

...there are few things as unattractive in a comedian as appearing to occupy, deliberately, the moral high-ground, especially with the degree of smugness I am prone to, even though I sometimes attempt to disguise this repulsive characteristic as a deliberate artistic choice, as if I were inhabiting a subtly crafted role rather than being an actual wanker. (How I Escaped My Certain Fate, 2010, p. 181)

From the little I've watched from his most recent special, Snowflake, I gather that he is still mining the same old track, to an audience that is now much older, and presumably even more frustrated and bitter, than they were in the mid-2000s. Fair enough; I can't expect someone like him to turn around and say, “actually, I think JK Rowling might have a point about biological sex”, or “you know, I'm really starting to wonder how safe and effective these vaccines are.”¹ He's got his audience, and he's playing to it.

I’ve seen Lee perform a number of times, and having met him a couple of times in the lobby afterwards, I’ve found him to be a very personable and humble guy. Although I wouldn’t go to one of his shows now, as I find myself too estranged from his ideological tribe to stomach his comedy, I still have to admire Lee as a craftsman, because when he is on top form, he at least prioritises the art of stand-up comedy as much as being an “actual wanker”. One of Lee's best-known routines, originally aired on Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle in 2014, takes a straw-manned 'right-wing' take on immigration and deconstructs it to absurdity. To give credit where credit's due, it is a funny routine, and Lee prefaces it with a surprisingly nuanced acknowledgement of the complexities in the debate over the economic impacts of migration. Granted, reducing the debate to economic factors alone is a sly game, but for a relatively mainstream comedian on the BBC, it was still quite impressive.

The reason I've brought it up, however, is not really to talk about Stew. No, the reason I'm writing about this particular routine is that provides an insight into the ahistorical mindset of the progressive, and the blind-faith in an ideology that may accelerate our descent into a fraught and uncertain future.

The context of Lee's routine is that of a pre-Brexit Britain in which the then-leader of Eurosceptic party UKIP, Paul Nuttall, suggested that “Bulgarians need to ensure that their brightest and best people stay in Bulgaria and make it economically prosperous, instead of coming to the UK to serve tea and coffee.” Lee goes on to apply the template of Nuttall's statement to various historical waves of immigration. Once he reaches the Anglo-Saxons, the routine starts to get interesting, but not for the reasons that Lee probably hoped:

...and before them, in the 5th century, it was the Anglo-Saxons, wasn't it? Bloody Anglo-Saxons! Coming over here from northern continental Europe! Anglo-Saxons, with their inlay jewellery, and their ship burial traditions, and their miserable epic poetry[...] My name's Paul Nuttall from UKIP and I say we need to ensure the brightest and best Anglo-Saxons stay in fifth-century northern continental Europe instead of coming over here to the UK and laying down the basis of our entire future language and culture.

Let me make it quite clear that I am not simply nitpicking a comedy routine for its historical accuracy, but analysing the implicit attitudes that inform Lee's satire. What is interesting is that Lee actually acknowledges the reality of the Anglo-Saxon migration into Britain; as dissident archaeologist Stone Age Herbalist notes in his essay “Hating the Saxon: The Academic Battle Against the English Origin Story”, this narrative has been downplayed and denied within the increasingly partisan university system, up until fairly recently. However, by contextualising the Anglo-Saxon migration alongside more recent and relatively minor influxes, such as that of the Poles or the French Huguenots, Lee is showing us how progressives observe their own history through a lens of sheltered cosmopolitanism. A middle-class, Oxford-educated inhabitant of Hackney in East London, Lee can't bring himself to acknowledge the immense disruption, displacement, and trauma that would have accompanied the Anglo-Saxons, as he himself admits, “laying down the basis of our entire future language and culture”; the remnants of the Brythonic languages that were once spoken throughout the island are now confined to areas of Wales, while the exploits of a semi-legendary British warlord, who managed to halt the Saxon advance for half a century, inspired the surviving Brythonic peoples to hope for his Messianic return for well over a millennium after his death.

In this mollycoddled, suburban view of history, however, the Saxons were just another addition to the endlessly accommodating melting-pot of an ahistorical, multicultural Britain, in which “every new development is just the re-instantiation of an eternal normality”, to quote Yeerk out of context. An alien who knew nothing of human culture would be forgiven for thinking that the Anglo-Saxons had done little more than move into Stoke Newington and open up a handful of ethnic bistros.

Lee continues his excavation of this peaceful, timelessly bland, and utterly fictitious nation by referring to “Beaker people, coming over here with their ceramic drinking vessels”, and “Neolithic people, with their pictograms and primitive wheat-farming innovations.” Returning to the messy world of historical reality, however, we're not talking about a few families moving in to run the neighbourhood corner-shops here; these prehistoric migrations were large-scale demographic upheavals, accomplished in many cases via military conquest. Not long after Lee's routine was aired on BBC2, a tectonic shift began in the world of archaeology. The Herbalist writes:

In 2015 two papers were published, Haak et al 2015 and Allentoft et al 2015, both triumphantly holding up the severed head of post-war archaeology with the following conclusions:

A third group of Europeans existed aside from the Western Hunter Gatherers and the Early European Farmers, these were either directly descended from the Yamnaya Steppe Cultures or a very similar group, this group migrated into Europe from the Pontic-Caspian region and most likely began the spread of Indo-European languages.

Along with these two papers came several more (Mathieson et al 2015 and Poznik et al 2015) which asserted that the Yamnaya invaders were fair skinned, much larger in stature and were predominantly male. (emphasis added)

Since then, genome studies have indicated a succession of near-total population replacements through mass migrations into Britain by the Early European Farmers and Bell Beakers respectively (Brace et al 2019; Olalde et al 2018), and a 50-100% replacement of eastern English male lineages during the early medieval Anglo-Saxon settlement (Gretzinger et al 2022). While genetic archaeology is a young science, it is nonetheless looks set to continue to undermine the Islington-friendly view of British history promoted by Lee and, to a certain extent, the old guard of post-1960s archaeology.

However, I can perfectly understand how and why this view became so prevalent. The fragmentation of European empires, the psychic fallout from the rise and fall of Nazism, and the push for economic globalization required a new view of the past; to borrow a term from comic-book fandom, we have 'retconned' the narratives of history to conform with an idealised future. Factions may disagree on whether their saccharine, pastel-coloured, public-mural vision of the future runs along the principles of neoliberal capitalism, international socialism, or some ghastly technocratic synthesis; the area of unconscious agreement between them all is the belief that modern Western civilization and its modern Western values are indestructible. Viewed in this light, Lee's routine about a cartoon xenophobe with a Liverpudlian accent who complains about every wave of migration down to, and including, the ‘migration’ of matter after the Big Bang might be an amusing bit of stand-up, but one which ultimately functions as a bulwark against the recognition of an uncomfortable historical reality: that no culture is invulnerable, and that mass migration creates volatile and unstable situations – at the very best of times.

For what it's worth, I happen to believe that the unprecedented numbers of boats arriving across the Channel packed mostly with young, single, men (remember those Yamnaya?) should be a cause for concern for anyone residing in this country, regardless of their own ethnic origins. I can't imagine that an inhabitant of early 5th-century Londinium should have been any less concerned by the looming collapse of Imperial borders just because he or she happened to be of Germanic, or North African, or Near-Eastern stock. Collapse doesn't discriminate.

To continue the historical analogy, the widely-circulated rumours that the men being housed in hotels up and down the country on taxpayer's money for no apparent reason are, in fact, soldiers stationed here for some undisclosed prerogative should make anyone feel the ominous chill of fate. This was seemingly confirmed by one of these men who, when questioned on camera by a member of the public, responded that “we're military guys, we work with your Special Forces.”

If you're familiar with the history of post-Roman Britain, you should be getting a sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach right now. The pioneers that led the way for the Germanic takeover of the ruins of the Western Roman Empire were also soldiers; the restless tribes that lived on and beyond the Empire's limits were extremely popular both as military conscripts and as mercenaries. Moreover, this trend most probably continued in Britain after the withdrawal of the Roman Legions in 410 AD. Here we come to the legend of the tragic mistake of Vortigern, victim of the original Night of the Long Knives; but that story will have to wait until next time.

1. According to a Guardian review of Snowflake, Lee devotes a bit about self-consciously refusing to take a stand of J.K. Rowling’s views on the infringement of women’s rights by gender-campaigners, which suggests to me he realises she’s got a point, but hasn’t quite got the balls to go public, because it would undermine his politically-correct persona.