Article

Christmas culture

Culture

Film & TV

21 December 2024

4 min read

This is love, actually

Love is not always simply a joy, delight, and comfort.

Cameron Wiltshire-Plant

Cameron is training to be a vicar in the city of Leicester.

Michael and Sarah.

I’m not a great lover of Love Actually, actually. I find it overlong, boring, and unrealistic. The plot holes are yawning. Aurelia’s lack of French despite her living and working in France with a father apparently fluent in French always irks me. Why would anybody in Keira Knightley’s shoes give her husband’s best man that kiss? On this year’s rewatch with my family, Joanna’s run all the way back through the airport, despite her plane to New York being on last call for some time, joined the list. The chauvinism and some of the jokes get more uncomfortable with each passing year.

I guess the suspension of disbelief is the point with a film that is deliberately tongue-in-cheek. Amid the mawkish tat there is a little in the way of saving grace- Emma Thompson’s performance, both in support for her friend Daniel as he grieves, and in dignified devastation at her husband’s unfaithfulness, will always be masterful and deeply affecting. But it is in Sarah’s storyline, caring for her mentally ill brother Michael, that best demonstrates love, actually.

Unless you’ve been under a rock for twenty years, you will know the story. Sarah silently yearns for her colleague Karl, something everyone in the office has become aware of. They get together at the Christmas party, and are about to get to it, when Michael rings, distressed, asking for the Pope, and needing Sarah’s reassurance. She answers the phone, twice, knowingly ending her chance with Karl for that evening, and possibly forever.

Love Actually is mostly full of glossy and unrealistic love. Attraction is easy, love comes quickly, meet cutes are abundant, demonstrations of love are impulsive and Christmas romances happen all over town. Pretty much everyone ends up twinkly-eyed despite the origins of their own story arcs. But Sarah turns down this kind of romantic love for an older, deeper, more burdensome love and a less happy ending.

In leaving behind her chances with Karl to care for Michael, Sarah self-sacrifices her own dreams to embrace the circumstances she has been given. In our current era of boundaries, self-prioritisation, and idealising of (particularly Christmas-orientated) romantic love, Sarah’s example is never more important. Hers and Michael’s story would not feature in a Hallmark Christmas film, and it feels the most real of all for that reason.

Sarah demonstrates that love is not always simply a joy, delight, and comfort, but very often a scarred, painful, and deliberate choice to put oneself second even when some or all of our being is resentful and resistant. The hand she has been dealt, being the only family for Michael, carrying his care on her shoulders alone, is not particularly fair. The demands sacrificial love makes of us are often not fair; romantic, familial, or otherwise, but to love truly is to love anyway, bearing the cost of loving those who are a burden to us, and the humiliation of being loved by those to whom we are a burden.

The siblings’ story strikes at the truest meaning of love at Christmas. Jesus’ birth is the eternal demonstration that God is not content to remain in the comfort of heaven in perfection, but instead comes to suffering and hurting humanity. In the same way that Sarah gently and firmly deals with Michael’s violence, so God deals with all the violence we throw at each other and at God, and loves us anyway. Just as Sarah sacrifices her own dreams of life with ‘lots of sex and babies’ with Karl to spend Christmas Day in a more costly, more true relationship with Michael, so God’s own Son gave up heaven and humbled himself to spend the first Christmas Day in a feeding trough, present to humanity and all its burdens.

If you attend a carol service this year you will probably hear the title given to Jesus by the prophet Isaiah of Immanuel, meaning God with us. This name demonstrates that although we all carry our own instability, weakness, and selfishness, God’s love does not leave us, but is all the more present with us in our need to be loved although we offer little or nothing in return to God. On a cosmic level, we are the burden, with our individual and communal tendency towards self-destruction. And yet, the Christmas story reminds us that God remains present to us.

This is love actually at Christmas. It’s not happy endings and spontaneous proposals. It’s painful, suffering, difficult, unfair, sacrificial love. Sarah and Michael’s story expresses the truest expression of love we will ever see. The kind that gives up dreams to be present to those who are suffering. The kind that gives up heaven to be present to those on Earth. The kind that accepts the love given by those who can give it, even if we feel humiliated by the depths of our need. If we choose to embrace the unglamorous, the burdensome, the inconvenient, we will never be closer to the first and truest of all Christmas stories.

Thank God for Sarah and Michael, who point us to the cowshed containing the God who does not abandon us for better and easier things, despite our fragility.

(And makes Love Actually a little less insufferable).

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Article

Culture

Economics

Ethics

1 May 2025

6 min read

The rights and wrongs of making money with meme coins

When does investing become speculating, or even addictive gambling?

Laurence Fletcher

Laurence Fletcher is a journalist at the Financial Times.

A montage shows Trump with a raised fist against other images of him and the phrase 'fight fight fight'.

$Trump coin marketing image.

gettrumpmemes.com,

Donald Trump’s “liberation day” tariffs may have driven sharp swings in global financial markets, but his actions in markets a few months earlier were in some ways even more peculiar.

On the Friday before his inauguration as the 47th US President in January, the Republican surprised many with the launch of the $TRUMP memecoin, described by its website as “the only official Trump meme”. The cryptocurrency token, in which Trump’s family business owned a stake, initially soared in value to more than $14bn over that following weekend.

Then, on the Sunday, Trump’s wife Melania launched her own memecoin, $MELANIA, which reached a value of $8.5bn. Even the pastor who spoke at the president’s inauguration subsequently launched his own memecoin.

For those wondering what exactly a memecoin is, you are not alone. In short, they are a form of cryptocurrency - an asset class that itself has attracted plenty of questions about its substance and purpose - representing online viral moments. They have no fundamental value or business model and, according to the US securities regulator, “typically have limited or no use or functionality”.

Donald and Melania Trump’s coins subsequently plunged in price, but still have a value of around $2.5bn and $214mn respectively, according to website CoinMarketCap.

There are plenty of others in existence. PEPE, based on a comic frog, has a value of around $3.6bn; BONK, a cartoon dog, has a market cap of $1.5bn; and PNUT, a reference to a squirrel euthanised by authorities in New York and about which Trump was allegedly “fired up” (although doubt has since been cast on the president’s involvement in the matter), is still valued at around $174mn, despite having fallen sharply in price.

Dogecoin, seen as the world’s first memecoin and originally created as a joke, boasts a market value of around $25bn. (There are other memecoins which may not be suitable for these pages).

Some people’s willingness to buy an “asset” with no use or fundamental value may seem strange to more traditional investors. But it can be viewed as just one manifestation of the speculative investor behaviour evident since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic and, indeed, at times throughout history.

The price of Bitcoin recently rose above $100,000, despite many investors still viewing it as having little or no value (in 2023 the UK’s Treasury select committee described cryptocurrencies as having “no intrinsic value, huge price volatility and no discernible social good”). In early 2021, shares in GameStop - a loss-making US video games retailer that some hedge funds were betting against - rocketed as much as 2,400 per cent, as retail investors piled in, many with the aim of inflicting pain on the hedge fund short sellers (in that respect at least, a highly successful strategy that became the subject of the film Dumb Money). The huge rise in AI and other tech stocks in recent years - until the recent tariff-driven volatility - has also been described as a bubble by some commentators.

Whether or not such episodes can be compared to infamous bouts of speculative mania in history depends on your point of view (and often can only be judged with the benefit of hindsight) - be it the 17th century Dutch tulip bulb mania, shares in the South Sea Company in the 18th century or the dotcom boom and bust of the late 1990s and early 2000s.

But it does give rise to the question of when investment should start to be described as speculation or even as gambling? And what are the rights and wrongs of any of those activities?

There can be negative effects, for instance if the actions of speculators force businesses in the real economy to change their plans or divert time and resources...

Gambling can be thought of as risking a stake on, for instance, the result of a game of chance or sport in the hope of a bigger payout. While often the result is purely down to chance, in some cases a strategy or an element of research (for instance of a horse or football team’s form) can be used. Investment, in contrast, tends to involve purported economic utility and assets believed to have some sort of underlying value, and holds the hope of future profit (although there are also plenty of bad investments or those that have gone to zero). While an investor must be prepared to lose their entire stake, in some cases such an event is relatively unlikely (for instance, if they buy a fund tracking the performance of a major stock exchange). Speculation is harder to define, but is generally seen as shorter term than investment, with more chance of a bigger gain or loss, and dependent on price fluctuations. Rightly or wrongly, the term has a more negative connotation than investment.

One writer who explored the ethics of these activities was Oswald von Nell-Breuning, a Jesuit theologian and economist who served as an adviser to the Pope and who was banned from publishing under the Nazis.

While he found that “one general definition cannot capture all the nuances” of speculation, he identified two different types of speculative activity - one that was purely trying to make a profit from financial market trading, and one based on trying to create a viable business. (See this article in the Catholic Social Science Review for a fuller explanation of Nell-Breuning’s views on speculation).

As the CSSR article shows, Nell-Breuning found that there can be positive effects from speculation - one might think of better liquidity and price discovery in a market, while, in commodity futures markets, speculators allow producers to hedge risk.

But he also argued that there can be negative effects, for instance if the actions of speculators force businesses in the real economy to change their plans or divert time and resources away from production.

And whereas gambling typically takes place within a circle of players who have chosen to take part, speculation, he wrote, can affect a greater portion of society - for instance, if it affects the price of shares or bonds they hold.

The Bible - on which Nell-Breuning’s faith and analysis was based - does not take a prescriptive approach to such activities. But it does provide some interesting guidance.

An entrepreneurial approach to business and investment is applauded, for instance when the writer of the book of Proverbs (traditionally believed to be King Solomon) praises the virtues of “an excellent wife”. These include investing in a field and using her earnings from business to plant a vineyard, and feeding her family from her gains.

Jesus tells a story of a master who, before going on a journey, gives his property to his servants, each according to their ability. To one he gives five “talents” (a large unit of money), to a second two and to a third servant he gives one.

The first servant trades with his talents and makes five more talents - a 100 per cent profit - and is applauded by the master on his return. The second servant also trades and similarly makes two more talents and is again applauded.

But the third servant, being afraid and believing the master to be “a hard man”, hides the money in a hole in the ground. He is condemned as “wicked and slothful”, and told that he should at least have put the money in the bank.

While Jesus’s story may primarily be about how we view God’s nature, how we use our God-given abilities and whether or not we can take risks in faith for Him, it is also hard not to see investment and indeed wise speculation as being virtuous activities here. Putting the money into a bank account is, in this story anyway, more of a fallback option.

But the Bible also warns us against putting money above all else in our lives. The love of money is, famously, a root of all sorts of evil, while we are also told to be content with what we have, and that “wealth gained hastily will dwindle”.

Nell-Breuning similarly warns that a “get-rich-quick” mindset, when this is placed above all else, can be harmful, and advises caution in situations where the lure of big profits can lead the speculator into market manipulation or fraud.

After all, both gambling and crypto trading have the potential to become dangerous and damaging addictions needing treatment.

Ultimately, Nell-Breuning struggled to come to a simple conclusion on the question of whether speculation, in and of itself, is morally wrong. It is, he wrote, a judgment call for those involved.

When making such decisions ourselves, his - and the Bible’s - warnings may be worth bearing in mind.