Engaging in the art of life

What, in short, is the difference between being “transported” by a concert, painting or play, and being teleported to Shopping or Estate Agent Heaven? Solipsism, while taking many forms, has but one rationale.

It is, however, the third element of the defence which is decisive: that full-blown participation in the economy of a virtual society is a totally rational way in which to keep body and soul together in our current version of the real world.

One does not have to inhabit the wilder shores of postmodernism to appreciate that the distinction between appearance and reality is ever more negotiable. (Postmodernism, in any case, is a crude rehash of arguments that have been in circulation for centuries.) Futures and options traders, developers, consultants of every conceivable variety all deal basically in abstractions, to which there may or may not correspond some tangible entity, but which nonetheless have a substantial impact on the behaviour of those who take them seriously.

Or to use the terminology of John Maynard Keynes in his percipient essay from several decades ago, Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren: in developed countries the “economic problem” - of securing food, shelter and necessities - has been solved. Technological innovation and industrial management are so advanced that the amount of work necessary to provide most people with a reasonable standard of living is in continuous decline, such that only a small amount of full-time labour is required to maintain a relatively prosperous order. Keynes thought it was possible most people could engage in “the art of life itself”: art, literature, philosophy, that sort of thing. Possible, but highly unlikely.

For the upshot, Keynes thought “with dread”, would be that, deprived of their normal purpose, the majority would be wholly unfit to occupy the potential leisure-time that science and financial surplus have made available. The consequence would instead be technological unemployment: “unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour”. Three-hour shifts or a 15-hour week, he suggested, might hold the problem off; but the “art of life itself” would be quite alien, if not positively threatening, to the self-image and values of most of the human race.

In practice, we have dealt with the problem by inventing a whole raft of utterly pointless jobs, producing and consuming superfluous goods and services, and “working” completely unnecessary hours: what amounts to a severe form of displacement behaviour.

Or, as John Kenneth Galbraith argued, we have turned pretty much the whole economy over to the entertainment industry. Wars aside - always a good way to keep people occupied - most of our economic progress consists in value-adding and devouring our way through a plethora of de facto amusements, of which gambling and pornography are the most lucrative sectors.

Given which, the case for virtual participation is highly persuasive. It certainly is possible to earn a living this way, even outdoing the Bulgarian GDP. Four Corners, for instance, highlighted the spectacular career of Anshe Chung, who has made the front cover of BusinessWeek as a millionaire property developer whose sales are of estates that exist only in the graphic images of Second Life. Her Linden to US Dollars may come in at 270 to 1; but that only requires inflating the fantasy price by the same ratio. Her millions in the bank are anything but virtual Greenbacks.

We may, of course, consider those who fork out (ultimately) good money to live in or copulate with electronic signals to be blithering idiots, but they are doing no harm and may in fact be displacing themselves from something far more pernicious.

As Keynes also wrote in the case of those who earn a living in the financial markets: many of the individuals attracted to the stock exchange and comparable money-making businesses are psychopaths. It is far better for society at large that they be thus occupied than perhaps exercising their talents in organised crime.

We should, in other words, be thankful that so many people prefer to go through their lives as avatars rather than impose on those who believe themselves to exist without delusions. After all, the critics’ injunction is to get a life. Does it really matter which one?