There’s a play that’s recently transferred to the West End called The Nether. It imagines a future internet that has become so thoroughly immersive and so convincingly interactive that some people “cross over” and live their entire lives within it. In this theatrically imagined reality the Nether is a digital environment where you can live out all your fantasies, however extreme, without adversely affecting other people. Or so its proponents argue. Suited up as avatars, adults role-play paedophilia with an 11-year-old girl – or rather the avatar of an 11-year-old girl – who encourages her “abusers” to finish her off with an axe after sex. The question posed by the play is whether there can be a world without consequence? Indeed, whether there are some ideas that are so intrinsically wicked that even to entertain them is wrong, irrespective of impact?
Even by watching and applauding the production I felt somehow complicit in, or at least too much in the company of, what was being imagined. Some thoughts one shouldn’t think. Some ideas ought to be banished from one’s head. The paedophile in the play argues that his behaviour in the Nether is a safe discharge of his sexual urges towards children. That no real children, only pixels, are harmed. That virtual paedophilia is victimless.
There is a difficult passage in Matthew’s gospel where Jesus insists that imagined adultery is as bad a real adultery. Perhaps it’s a way of focusing moral attention on to who we are, as distinct from merely what we do. But this cuts against many of our common assumptions about morality, not least that in the realm of the imagination we ought to be entirely free. The Nether’s director, Jeremy Herrin, also directed the stage adaptation of Wolf Hall, reminding us of a world where people were burnt for thinking the wrong thoughts. Policing the imagination is the ultimate fascism. Take Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. But the point is surely this: imagination is not cut off from consequence. We all end up being shaped by what we imagine. And that, as it happens, is how the play concludes, albeit hesitantly.
Disturbingly, the world of the Nether is hardly some distant reality. Anders Breivik spent hours, months, immersed in World of Warcraft before he murdered all those people in Norway. Of course, millions of gamers have inhabited this alternative reality without play violence returning back into reality. And I have blown away my fair share of baddies in Call of Duty (cathartic relaxation for a vicar sick of having to be professionally nice). But for some reason a simulated killing spree feels morally very different to simulated paedophilia – though I cannot think of a convincing reason why, other than that I imagine online sexual role-play is reinforced by real life masturbation, thus establishing a clear link between the real and the imaginary.
Some psychological studies have denied the same sort of link between virtual and real violence. But I can’t help but think some link is inevitable, that we become what we practise. I get why some relatives of the Columbine high school massacre sought damages against video game companies. One of the killers apparently even named his shotgun after a character from Doom. The real and the imaginary interpenetrate. Take Jihadi John. Even the name he has been given sounds like some stupid avatar. His black mask is just the sort of central casting get-up one could imagine a gamer to adopt if he or she were playing the role of a terrorist. It feels like some ghastly leakage back from the world of the imagination.
This column is written more in the interrogative than the assertive. But it instinctively strikes me that the real and the imaginary are porous to each other. The Nether’s producers take great pains to protect the 11-year-old actor from the consequences of her playing the willing “victim” of paedophilia. Why would they do that if not because they recognise the imaginary has real-life impact?
