Article

Character

Comment

Friendship

Virtues

22 January 2025

1 min read

As algorithms divide us, who should we be loyal to?

An ethicist’s answer, shows we need courage and wisdom too.

Isaac Frisby

Isaac is a PhD candidate in Theology at Durham University and preparing for priesthood in the Church of England.

Three people sitting looking out over viewpoint are silhouetted against the sky.

Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash.

What is loyalty? As we plunge into this new year of 2025 it seems as pressing a question as ever. The war in Ukraine rumbles on, a fresh Labour government continues to struggle with public opinion, and America returns to the unpredictable rule of the first president in its history to be a convicted felon. The algorithms of social media continue to segregate and amplify different audiences into ever more closed feedback loops and echo chambers. This may bolster loyalty to a point of view, but estrange us further from our friends and neighbours whose loyalties lie elsewhere. All of these and many other cases highlight the conflict of loyalties in our society and wider world. What is even more obvious is that if we are to make peace, cultivate love for enemies, and pursue the common good, then perhaps the most in-demand virtue of 2025, at the top over every wish list, might just be loyalty.

But what really is loyalty?

I was struck by a persuasive answer given by Dr Tony Milligan, research fellow in philosophical ethics at King’s College London, during his appearance on a recent episode of The Moral Maze on BBC Radio 4 that asked ‘is loyalty a virtue or a vice?’ He said loyalty is, “Sharing another person’s commitments and the willingness to go through various kinds of adversity in order to pursue those commitments and to further them.” Under cross examination and asked if loyalty is then an absolute virtue he responded, “I think that it’s absolute in the sense that we absolutely need to have it, that it’s basic to the human condition and not optional.” His second interrogator, Giles Fraser, then suggested a ‘high doctrine of mates’. In this doctrine you are loyal to your mates in all circumstances, even if they are ‘wrong-uns’. Dr Milligan’s response, when asked how he would characterise this ‘doctrine of mates’ position, was fascinating: “Addiction.” Fraser then asked if that addiction could be love. “It’s a case of love, and we don’t get to choose the people that we love. We find ourselves in the predicament and then try to make the best of it…I love my wife Susanne, I’ve been with her 31 years, and it’s love, and it’s also addiction. I just can’t envisage a world in which I would be without her.” This framed Dr Milligan’s final powerful point: love, and the loyalty which love entails, gives us our sense of value.

I can bear witness to the truth of Dr Milligan’s intertwining of love and loyalty. Last autumn I became a father for the second time. My love for my eldest is so great that there was a real question: ‘if my love for my eldest is so total, so all encompassing, how can I possibly love a second as much?’ This question melted away as I gazed into her screwed-up face, moments after she entered the world. I am completely dedicated to ensuring that she flourishes and I would “go through various kinds of adversity in order to pursue” her flourishing. As Dr Mulligan also said, loyalty “is basic to the human condition and not optional.” Of course, how this total and non-zero-sum loyalty of love to both of my children actually works in practice requires of me thoughtful negotiation. If one wants to go to the park and the other wants to go to the swimming pool I cannot split in two and do both things at once. Loyalty, as finite human beings, requires wisdom in living in the middle of a messy network of demands and desires, of the preferences and needs of others.

If loyalty is then one thing, it is the willingness to recognise that we are tied to other people, whether we like it or not. Cain’s question to God, when God came looking for Abel, is still pertinent: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Perhaps the greatest disloyalty is the implied ‘no’ in Cain’s rhetorical question. In denying that he is bound to his brother he is disloyal not only to Abel, but to himself because he denies his own humanity and isolates himself from the humanity of other people. If we isolate ourselves, having loyalty only to ourselves, we lose the joy of being fully human. If we simply kill those we dislike, whether literally (in war or murder) or metaphorically (‘unfriending’, cancelling, pretending they do not exist), then we follow Cain. Loyalty, as the tie that binds us to the messiness of the real world where people vehemently disagree all the time, requires not only wisdom then but courage also. It takes courage to commit to one person in marriage. It takes courage to raise a child. It takes courage to continue to talk with and to love those with whom you deeply disagree.

When practising our 2025 New Year’s resolutions let us make sure that amongst the commitments to get back to the gym and practice that new hobby that we remember to practice loyalty. Loyalty not only to those we love, but to those we might come to love. Let us be wise enough and brave enough to be fettered to those with whom we disagree, loyal to the humanity that binds us together.

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Snippet

Care

Comment

Mental Health

Time

14 January 2025

4 min read

Why Blue Monday resonates despite the pseudoscience

The seasons of life actually need some meteorological awareness.

Rachael Newham

Rachael is an author and theology of mental health specialist.

A wrapped-up man sits and leans against a bare tree, as dark clouds give way to sun.

Isaak Alexandre Karslian on Unsplash.

Christmas cheer has long gone, the weather is grey and wet, bills are high and we’ve most likely already broken our New Year’s resolutions - January seems to have a lot to answer for!

So much so that the third Monday in January has actually been called “Blue Monday” - the most depressing day of the year.

It was developed using a mathematical equation taking into account all the elements of January misery - and the cure? Booking a sunny holiday.

It sounds like it makes sense, doesn't it? Don’t we all feel a slump in the dark cold days in the middle of January?

The problem is, ‘Blue Monday’ is based on some rather shaky pseudoscience concocted purely for a travel company to sell their summer holidays. In the equation, the units are undefined, and the formula can’t be verified making it effectively useless.

Despite this, the idea of Blue Monday has captured our imaginations and our attention - meaning that even though it is nothing more than a marketing campaign written way back in 2005 - the idea has stuck around because it makes sense.

And we like to make sense of our feelings, don’t we? If we can pinpoint a specific reason for why we feel low or unmotivated, we feel less alone. Perhaps that’s why the idea of Blue Monday has persisted for twenty years.

For some, the seasons can have a tangible effect on mental health, up to three percent of people live with ‘significant winter depression’ and gimmicks like Blue Monday risk trivialising the debilitation of Seasonal Affective Disorder.

Even for those of us who do not live with seasonal mental illnesses, we have different needs according to the seasons. Our energy ebbs and flows throughout the year - it’s natural to want to live at a slower pace during the dark winter months -many people find themselves sleeping and eating more when we have shorter days and longer nights.

Emotionally we will also have seasons where we experience life as vibrantly as spring and others when we want to retreat and feel the need to grieve our losses as the seeds hide beneath the ground away from the cold, waiting to bloom.

Author Katherine May writes about this in her book Wintering: “Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through.”

It’s something that both the Bible and the church year recognise, that we have to adapt to the seasons of life we’re living in. The writer of Ecclesiastes, sometimes thought to be King Saul, writes that “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens” and he goes on to include living and dying, planting and uprooting, killing and healing.

We can be encouraged that there is no specific day that is more or less depressing than any of the others, but also recognise the changing seasons that our emotions go through in the same way as the natural world does.

What matters is that we, lean into the season of life we’re in and not deny it. The church year allows us to do so through liturgy, as we cycle through Advent, Christmas. Lent, Easter and Ordinary time. There are opportunities to grieve our losses, celebrate our joys, learn lessons and practice what it means to be in community through every emotion. By going through these seasons and leaning into the meteorological seasons we give ourselves a chance to stretch our emotional muscles in mourning, rejoicing and simply working out how to navigate everyday life!

Paul, who pastored and wrote to many churches in their early days, told one church in Rome to “Laugh with your happy friends when they’re happy; share tears when they’re down,” and this I think is simple advice for us as we travel through the seasons of our lives and the year. All emotions - however uncomfortable they might be - need attention.