We are entering a second dark age. But the light that flickers on the screens of our iPhones, from a five-second clip of a dog sliding on some ice, is blinding us to the encroaching blackness.

Our civilisation teeters at the abyss. We are 8th-century Lindisfarne monks, spotting black Viking sails on the horizon and hurrying to hide our illuminated manuscripts, before shaving our hair into tonsures to look less desirable to frustrated seafarers.

But barbarians come in many guises. Having farmed out the act of examining children to independent companies, plans are now in place to stop offering A-levels in art history and archaeology to a relatively small customer base, or schoolchildren, as they used to be called.

The canary in the mine of British cultural life just expired. But who were these so-called “canaries” anyway, with their elitist lungs, presuming to warn of us of supposedly dangerous gas?

Where will tomorrow’s archaeologists come from? Who will carry out all the investigations needed as trophy infrastructure projects pulverise our buried history, destroying it for ever?

Planet of the Apes is based on the satire La Planète des singes, written by a Frenchman and so now inadmissible

Brexit Britain doesn’t care. Historians and archaeologists are just more “experts”, slowing down our thrilling progress towards the cliff, with their cumbersome facts and obstructive understanding.

Surely some ideas are inherently valuable in and of themselves. There could be no clearer example of the extent to which we have lost our way than the abandonment of art history and archaeology. Unless perhaps the new education secretary, Justine Greening, were to go on a long symbolic quest to seek the mythical holy grail and, having found the talismanic object, ancient vessel of incalculable wisdom and understanding, shat in it.

The downward spiral continues. Beneath its calculatedly contentious opinion pieces, the online version of the Daily Telegraph offers its digi-consumers the opportunity to agree with one of three off-the-peg notions. There are few more reliable indicators of the rapidly escalating banality of the world. The clouds descend.

Asked “Was the Norman conquest a good thing?”, seven-and-a-half thousand of the Daily Telegraph’s purple-faced readers thought it worth clicking either “Yes. It made us what we are today”, “No! Throw off the Norman yoke”, or “Who knows? It happened. That’s all there is to say”. The last option, a presumably deliberate literary irony, economically expresses the fatalistic worldview common to Anglo-Saxon poetry, which the Norman conquest subsequently supplanted with its dry Gallic insouciance.

The question in question related to a humorous thinkpiece by the Brexit cheerleader and Daily Telegraph blogger Dan “Dan” Hannananananan, who was named “10th most influential person on the centre-right in the United Kingdom” by the Daily Telegraph in 2009.

This genuine chart, which really exists, found Dan “Dan” Hannananananan only nine positions away from the coveted “most influential person on the centre-right in the United Kingdom” trophy, a small mirror on a stick that can be slid into the public’s brains through their ears to reflect what people are really thinking but dare not say, because of political correctness gone mad and Gary Lineker’s leftwing thought police.

But by 2011, Dan “Dan” Hannananananan had fallen 28 places to be merely the 38th most influential person on the centre-right in the United Kingdom, like some kind of Enoch Powell-admiring elevator tumbling down the broken lift shaft of centre-right influence.

Nevertheless, Dan “Dan” Hannananananan’s role in delivering the pro-Brexit result in the recent national anti-immigration referendum will surely see him zoom up to the top of the “most influential person on the centre-right in the United Kingdom” chart this year.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Illustration by David Foldvari.

Most awards ceremonies are interminable, but the “most influential person on the centre-right in the United Kingdom” event is one I’d love to attend, if only to see Dan “Dan” Hannananananan navigate the complexities of the finger buffet with the same decorum with which he steered a course through the national anti-immigration referendum and £350m-a-week NHS funding vote.

Dan “Dan” Hannananananan’s Daily Telegraph column of earlier this month, entitled “The Norman Conquest Was a Disaster for England. We Should Celebrate Naseby, Not Hastings”, argued that the Norman conquest of 1066 was a disaster for England and suggested we should celebrate the battle of Naseby and not the battle of Hastings.

Dan “Dan” Hannananananan, who studied history at Oxford, sees pre-Norman conquest England as an idyllic utopia, which then became “clenched in a mailed fist. Men were required by law to work on their lord’s estates and forbidden to leave without his permission”. Dan “Dan” Hannananananan could almost be describing the plans his co-Brexiter Jeremy Hunt has for junior doctors.

I wonder if it made much difference to the 11th-century English serf whether his face was being ground into the dirt by a sturdy Anglo-Saxon boot or slapped humiliatingly with a decadent French slipper.

To be fair to Dan “Dan” Hannananananan, who is a very intelligent man, I don’t think his essay was entirely serious, although I agree with him that it’s time the 11th-century Normans were given a good kicking. Like his co-Brexiter Boris Johnson’s leaked pro-Europe Daily Telegraph column, the piece reads on some level like a deliberate satire of clanking propaganda.

All cultures need genesis myths. Odin and his brothers made the first men from trees. The Haida raven cracked humanity out of a clamshell. But Brexit Britain, birthed in still-steaming divisions, does not have one. Dan “Dan” Hannananananan is reaching back to find a serviceable national story.

In 1136, Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote his History of the Kings of Britain, which disinterred the King Arthur tales as if they were fact and sent the barely existent monarch on foreign military excursions, invented to provide precedents for the policies of the recently deceased Henry I and to bind the country with a potent national myth.

The movie Planet of the Apes is based on the satire La Planète des singes, which was written by a Frenchman, Pierre Boulle, and so is now inadmissible. In it, history is rewritten to erase human civilisation by a despotic orangutan, like a Brexiter, but sharing more human DNA. Underneath the shattered Statue of Liberty, Charlton Heston finds a human doll that says “Mama”. “Would an ape make a human doll that talks?” he asks, through gritted teeth.

It is the year 2040. I stand on a Scottish island, having fled my much changed homeland. In the museum, my granddaughter finds a toy of a Tower of London guard. “Beefeater!” she says, “Beef! Beef!” And I think about etymology, and the history Dan “Dan” Hannananananan cannot quite rewrite.

Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle (Series 4) is out now on DVD and the new live show, Content Provider, is in London and touring; see stewartlee.co.uk