Article
Character
Comment
Friendship
Virtues
4 min read

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

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

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.

Join with us - Behind the Seen

Seen & Unseen is free for everyone and is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you’re enjoying Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Alongside other benefits (book discounts etc.), you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing what I’m reading and my reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin

Editor-in-Chief

Article
Books
Comment
Film & TV
Morality
6 min read

Murder we wrote: how cosy crime and psycho-thrillers carve our minds

Our reactions have changed from heart-wringing cries to merely puzzle-solving

Theodore is author of the historical fiction series The Wanderer Chronicles.

Elderly amateur sleuth stand by their pinboard.
The Thursday Murder Club convenes.
Netflix.

We love murder. 

That seems to be the only reasonable conclusion when you look at the sales figures of Richard Osman’s record-busting murder mystery series, which opened with The Thursday Murder Club back in 2020. In UK sales alone, it sold over a million copies within the same year as its release, something no other book has ever done.  

This was more than a bestselling debut novel, this was a cultural event in UK publishing. And no doubt Netflix are hoping for something equally seismic when their film adaptation of The Thursday Murder Club goes live. 

The combination of light humour, a clutch of charismatic octogenarians, tea and cake, and the odd violent death or two to keep them entertained, seems to have struck the motherlode of British cultural appeal. I can only imagine the stellar cast they have assembled for the film adaptation, led by Helen Mirren and Pierce Brosnan, will take the series’ success to new heights. 

As an author currently puzzling my way through my own contemporary murder mystery, I can only look on at the phenomenon in wonder and sigh for what may yet be.  

But murder has always been a tricky one for me as a) an author, and b) a Christian. Do those two facts mean I have to be a “Christian author”? And if so, what kind of limits does that put around what I should be writing about? It may not sound like much of a conundrum to you, but honestly I have wrestled with this question for a long time. There is darkness in the world: how much darkness should I explore in my books? (So far, if you ever read any of my historical novels, you’ll see the answer is: quite a lot.) 

Maybe I’m taking it all too seriously and murder is mere light entertainment now. Death is to be enjoyed with a nice cup of tea; evil, with slice of Victoria sponge cake. 

But somehow, I don’t think so. 

Recently, I was helped in my moral quandary by another crime author, Andrew Klavan. In his book, The Kingdom of Cain, published last month, Klavan explores the question of evil and specifically murder in what he terms a ‘literature of darkness’. It is a fascinating, if unusual, book. His approach is to take three murders that actually happened, and demonstrate how each has influenced a long succession of murder novels (and movies) up to the present day.  

Through this exposition, we witness the changing attitudes to murder over the last century and a half and in particular how those changes seem strongly linked to the ebbing tide of Christian faith in the West. 

For example, Dostoyevsky’s great novel, Crime and Punishment, was published in 1866. The double-murder, central to the plot, is carried out by a young student named Raskolnikov. He is an intellectual who is seeking to prove that the moral boundary beyond which murder lies is nothing more than a mere concoction, a social construct (or worse, a religious one) which he, being of superior intelligence, can transcend and therefore ignore. The entire novel is the story of how his conscience will not allow him to get away with this. Near the end, he confesses his crime to the young prostitute, Sonya, who responds to his confession in fearful horror: 

“What have you done? What have you done to yourself?” 

The second question is key. 

Dostoyevsky based the plot of his novel on a real axe-murderer, a Frenchman called Pierre François Lacenaire, who went to the guillotine in 1836. Lacenaire became an international sensation when, in court, he aired many of his own pseudo-intellectual justifications for his actions – that the murders he committed were a strike against the injustice of the elites and the iniquitous power structures of the day. Rather than what they appeared to be: a grubby little double murder for the sake of a few francs. Lacenaire set the tune which many still whistle today, I’m sorry to say. 

But Dostoyevsky was prophetic. He foresaw long before Nietzsche and others who would follow, that the tide of Christian faith was going out in Western civilization. And so it continued to do through the back end of the twentieth century and into this one. 

Before that, the notion that murder is wrong because every human being is made in the image of God was a long-held axiom, going back arguably to the first chapters of Genesis. And in killing the image of God, any image of God, this may therefore be the closest we can come to killing God himself. Seen in that light, murder is sacrilege on an appalling scale.  

But there’s the rub. That light has dimmed. The secular philosophies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have turned down the dimmer-switch, so that it is no longer axiomatic that humans possess an inherent sacred value. Instead, in varying guises and to varying degrees, the conclusion has been that humans are nothing but self-conscious lumps of meat. We (the state, the law) may ascribe them some value. “We are all equal,” yes - but as George Orwell anticipated, “some are more equal than others.” (Is intersectionality, for example, anything but the manifestation of that prediction?) 

Maybe this explains how the horror of murder has diminished from Sonya’s heart-wringing cry, into something more akin to a crossword puzzle. Don’t get me wrong, I love a good Agatha Christie. But her murder mysteries don’t waste much time on the philosophical implications of, say, the local doctor bumping off the parish priest. 

And from there, the genre of the murder mystery has split into two strains. On the one hand, we get the psycho-thriller, in which the horror of the act of murder is of less interest than the dark psychological state of mind of the killer themselves. But if that’s too dark, don’t worry. We can do light, too! And so on to cosy crime blockbusters, in which, if a murder was committed, it was because the victim had it coming – so let’s all calm down and have another slice of cake. 

There is no space here in which to explore how, as a culture, our collective historical experience may have helped to steer us in this direction, as well as our changing philosophy. But there is no doubt where we have ended up. We see death cults all around us. We see legislation being passed in our Parliament which would have been unthinkable until very recently. We see social justice where before we saw crimes.  

Think about how often the arch-crimes of history have been perpetrated on the ground of viewing the “other” as less than human, and certainly less than sacred. Then ask yourself, why should we see any human as more than a lump of meat? At what point does the rubber hit the road? - as surely it will. 

What have we done? What have we done to ourselves? 

I do wonder where all this goes. And yet, if the spiritual bellwethers are to be believed, perhaps we have reached low tide at long last – certainly it has revealed some pretty ugly creatures lurking at the bottom of the rock pool. Many, myself included, must hope that the tide of faith is truly on the turn. Let’s see. Certainly, if this proves to be the case, it seems to follow that our attitude to murder will change with that on-rushing tide. And so with it, the literature of darkness. 

Beyond The Thursday Murder Club, there may yet be other great stories told of murder; they, like Crime & Punishment, will be far truer, and in a paradoxical sense, far more beautiful. After all, at the heart of the gospel, there lies a murder. If God himself can take such a dark event and turn it into light, then, at a far inferior level perhaps, as His image-bearers, so might we. 

Which reminds me… back to my draft.

Support Seen & Unseen

Since Spring 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,500 articles. All for free. 
This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?
 
Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin
Editor-in-Chief