Is western civilisation being destroyed by its own decadence? Was the Roman empire? And does a preference for Lord of the Rings over The Matrix indicate that we are all doomed? Our critic tries to sift fact from fiction …

We are decadent. It’s obvious. Look around you. Books have been replaced by screens, restaurants are bigger cultural events than art (though they too are dying), and our highest cultural temple is The Traitors. “Western civilisation is being destroyed by its own decadence,” ran a Daily Telegraph headline last year. In his book The Decadent Society, American journalist Ross Douthat argues that the US has been in decline ever since Neil Armstrong got back from the moon. And conservative provocateur Michel Houellebecq has made the decadence of the west a pervasive theme of his novels – including the most recent, Annihilation, which I got for Christmas and read by twinkling tree lights, its bleak vision gradually sapping my festive spirit. So now I am going to inflict Houellebecq’s story on you.

A French civil servant, returning to his teenage bedroom, sees his old posters for The Matrix Revolutions and it all comes flooding back. He was obsessed with that 2003 film, he remembers, but his younger sister Cécile and her generation had other fandoms: “Not Nirvana now, but Radiohead; and not The Matrix, but The Lord of the Rings. There were only two years between them, but that might have been enough to explain the difference, things still moved quite quickly in those days, much less quickly than in the 1960s, of course, or even in the 1970s, the deceleration and immobilisation of the west, heralding its annihilation, had been progressive.”