Article

Belief

Comment

Film & TV

27 January 2025

5 min read

When Faithfuls lack faith, there’s a lot more to lose

Having faith is hard. It can be a costly act of courage.

Jonathan Rowlands

Jonathan is a theology lecturer and Liverpool FC fan.

Four game show contestants and a host stand in the garden of stately home.

The Faithful Four.

And so The Traitors comes to a close once again.

Despite the small matter of it reinforcing my anxieties about our modern predisposition for isolation, I’ve really enjoyed this series. It’s been full of twists, tension, and just the right amount of over-the-top melodrama.

And in this respect, the series finale did not disappoint. Amidst the backstabbing, and the reveals, and the arguments, however, it got me thinking about the nature of faith.

Be warned: there are spoilers ahead for the finale of The Traitors.

As the finale begins, pseudo-Welshwoman Charlotte (I promise that makes sense in context) is the last Traitor standing. However, she is unmasked as a Traitor by Faithful Frankie, who wins the power to reveal one contestant’s identity and picks the right person through a mildly infuriating fluke.

Charlotte is banished and the remaining four Faithfuls enter ‘the endgame’. At this point, if all four agree, the game ends and they split the £94,600 jackpot between them. That is, unless a traitor remains in the game. In that case, the traitor takes the lot.

It was absolutely fascinating and more than a little heartbreaking to watch these four people – all of whom were Faithfuls – work out whether they can trust each other. If all of them agree to end the game, they each walk away with £23,500.

But they don’t.

Initially, all four contestants decide to continue. None of them quite trusts the people around them. And so, the hapless Alexander is voted off next. He was too pure for this game anyway; he would have given his share to charity.

Three remain. All three once again vote to continue.

One contestant, Jake, says

“I’m just not confident that I can trust the people around me.”

And so he, along with the other remaining Faithful Leanne, votes to banish Frankie. The same Frankie who outed Charlotte as a Traitor. The same Frankie who wanted the money so she could surprise her boys back home.

Two remain. And so the game ends by default.

But the doubts don’t end. Jake and Leanne are left wondering if they will leave with £47,300 each, or if they’re just about to be screwed over by the other. The viewer gets the impression that, if each could banish the other, they would.

“Why won’t you look me in the eyes?!” Leanne asks Jake in a panic, now seemingly convinced Jake is a traitor, about to take away all her hard-earned money. About to take away her only chance at IVF, and a baby.

Both are revealed as Faithfuls and the game ends with joy and tears. Jake gets to renovate his house, Leanne gets to try for a baby. All is well. Except for the 23 other contestants who leave with nothing, dreams in tatters.

I’m not saying that Jake, Leanne, Frankie, and Alexander are wrong for being suspicious of others. Having faith is hard. It is an act of courage.

The only way the common good is most fruitfully attained is through the exercising of faith in one another.

It’s easy not to have faith in very much at the moment. Our politicians are a heady mix of inept and corrupt. Our institutions often appear as little more than opaque, faceless entities hell-bent on self-preservation and self-interest, costs be damned.

It’s hard to make a compelling case for why you should trust the state. Or the police. Or even the Church. Or any other number of people or institutions. Each is surrounded by a litany of failure and cover up. In such a context, faith seems an act of foolishness.

And notice, too, that having faith in their fellow Faithfuls would have been a costly decision to make. Leanne and Jake leave The Traitors with £47,300. Had they trusted their fellow Faithfuls, that number would be halved. Still a remarkable amount of money but, when you’re attempting IVF or renovating a house, this can be the difference between getting everything you’ve dreamed of, or not.

That’s exactly what The Traitors finale brings into such sharp relief. It takes courage to have faith. It is not a cop out. To have faith in those around us is to put our neck on the chopping block and hope no-one swings the axe.

To have faith is to risk that which is most dear to us in the hope that others might have what matters most to them. It is a deeply vulnerable act of selflessness. It is not meant to be easy.

And so ultimately, we can forgive the Faithfuls their faithlessness. Would you trust a complete stranger if £47,300 was on the line? When I think of everything that money would mean for my family, I’m not sure I would.

But the only way the common good is most fruitfully attained is through the exercising of faith in one another. Only through faith in the fundamental goodness of humanity can we reach a truly equitable society where Leanne gets her baby, and Jakes gets his house, and Frankie gets to treat her family, and Alexander gets to donate to charity. (Bless that man, but he is slightly undercutting my point with his selflessness here. How selfish of him.)

Having faith is not easy, or fun, or comfortable, or without sacrifice. It is an act of love that costs much. An act of love that places us in a relationship with others that is vulnerable to abuse and deceit and harm. And for those who have had their faith repaid with abuse and deceit and harm, the cost of continuing to live in faith can understandably seem too high.

But maybe, just maybe, there is truth and goodness and beauty to be found in humanity of those around me. Maybe, just maybe, The Traitors warns us of the dangers of allowing our suspicions to trump our faith in each.

Maybe, just maybe, it invites us to imagine a better alternative.

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Article

Comment

21 June 2024

4 min read

It's our mistakes that make us human

What we learn distinguishes us from tech.

Silvianne Aspray

Silvianne Aspray is a theologian and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Cambridge.

A man staring at a laptop grimmaces and holds his hands to his head.

Francisco De Legarreta C. on Unsplash.

The distinction between technology and human beings has become blurry: AI seems to be able to listen, answer our questions, even respond to our feelings. It becomes increasingly easy to confuse machines with humans. In this situation, it is increasingly important to ask: What makes us human, in distinction from machines? There are many answers to this question, but for now I would like to focus on just one aspect of what I think is distinctively human: As human beings, we live and learn in time.

To be human means to be intrinsically temporal. We live in time and are oriented towards a future good. We are learning animals, and our learning is bound up with the taking of time. When we learn to know or to do something, we necessarily make mistakes, and we take practice. But keeping in view something we desire – a future good – we keep going.

Let’s take the example of language. We acquire language in community over time. Toddlers make all sorts of hilarious mistakes when they first try to talk, and it takes them a long time even to get single words right, let alone to try and form sentences. But they keep trying, and they eventually learn. The same goes with love: Knowing how to love our family or our neighbours near and far is not something we are good at instantly. It is not the sort of learning where you absorb a piece of information and then you ‘get’ it. No, we learn it over time, we imitate others, we practice and even when we have learned, in the abstract, what it is to be loving, we keep getting it wrong.

This, too, is part of what it means to be human: to make mistakes. Not the sort of mistakes machines make, when they classify some information wrongly, for instance, but the very human mistake of falling short of your own ideal. Of striving towards something you desire – happiness, in the broadest of terms – and yet falling short, in your actions, of that very goal. But there’s another very human thing right here: Human beings can also change. They – we – can have a change of heart, be transformed, and at some point in time, actually start to do the right thing – even against all the odds. Statistics of past behaviours, do not always correctly predict future outcomes. Part of being human means that we can be transformed.

Transformation sometimes comes suddenly, when an overwhelming, awe-inspiring experience changes somebody’s life as by a bolt of lightning. Much more commonly, though, such transformation takes time. Through taking up small practices, we can form new habits, gradually acquire virtue, and do the right thing more often than not. This is so human: We are anything but perfect. As Christians would say: We have a tendency to entangle ourselves in the mess of sin and guilt. But we also bear the image of the Holy One who made us, and by the grace and favour of that One, we are not forever stuck in the mess. We are redeemed: are given the strength to keep trying, despite the mistakes we make, and given the grace to acquire virtue and become better people over time. All of this to say that being human means to live in time, and to learn in time.

So, this is a real difference between human beings and machines: Human beings can, and do strive toward a future good.

Now compare this to the most complex of machines. We say that AI is able to “learn”. But what does it mean to learn, for AI? Machine learning is usually categorized into supervised learning, unsupervised and self-supervised learning. Supervised learning means that a model is trained for a specific task based on correctly labelled data. For instance, if a model is to predict whether a mammogram image contains a cancerous tumour, it is given many example images which are correctly classed as ‘contains cancer’ or ‘does not contain cancer’. That way, it is “taught” to recognise cancer in unlabelled mammograms. Unsupervised learning is different. Here, the system looks for patterns in the dataset it is given. It clusters and groups data without relying on predefined labels. Self-supervised learning uses both methods: Here, the system uses parts of the data itself as a kind of label – such as, for instance, predicting the upper half of an image from its lower half, or the next word in a given text. This is the predominant paradigm for how contemporary large-scale AI models “learn”.

In each case, AI’s learning is necessarily based on data sets. Learning happens with reference to pre-given data, and in that sense with reference to the past. It may look like such models can consider the future, and have future goals, but only insofar as they have picked up patterns in past data, which they use to predict future patterns – as if the future was nothing but a repetition of the past.

So this is a real difference between human beings and machines: Human beings can, and do strive toward a future good. Machines, by contrast, are always oriented towards the past of the data that was fed to them. Human beings are intrinsically temporal beings, whereas machines are defined by temporality only in a very limited sense: it takes time to upload data, and for the data to be processed, for instance. Time, for machines, is nothing but an extension of the past, whereas for human beings, it is an invitation to and the possibility for being transformed for the sake of a future good. We, human beings, are intrinsically temporal, living in time towards a future good – which machines do not.

In the face of new technologies we need a sharpened sense for the strange and awe-inspiring species that is the human race, and cultivate a new sense of wonder about humanity itself.