Profound wisdom or hate speech?

MY appreciation of St Augustine derives from his understanding that everything about the life of faith is predicated on love. Most famously he once said, “Love, and do what you will: whether you hold your peace, through love hold your peace; whether you cry out, through love cry out; whether you correct, through love correct; whether you spare, through love should you spare: let the root of love be within, of this root can nothing spring but what is good.” (Seventh Homily on 1 John 4:4-12)

This quotation in its shortened form often appears as, “love God and do whatever you please” and while that is not what St Augustine said, in some ways, it captures the idea that if the love of God is the central infiuence of your life then every action, deed and thought will be constrained by love.

How then is it possible that this Saint of the Church and this champion of love comes to be prohibited on Facebook under suspicion of hate speech?

Well, Demenico Bettinelli is a Catholic blogger from Massachusetts and he included in one of his posts this most challenging and profound extract from another of St Augustine’s sermons, “Let us never assume that if we live good lives we will be without sin; our lives should be praised only when we continue to beg for pardon. But men [and women] are hopeless creatures, and the less they concentrate on their own sins, the more interested they become in the sins of others. They seek to criticise, not to correct. Unable to excuse themselves, they are ready to accuse others.”

Even after an appeal, this post was considered off ensive and was removed. It was also removed from the Facebook pages of many friends who reposted the same quotation. Demenico’s Facebook account was then threatened with closure because a computer algorithm (a set of rules to be followed in calculations or problem-solving operations), confirmed by a human reviewer, had understood some part of this profound restatement of Matthew 7:3 as hate speech.

Who would have thought that St Augustine could be guilty of such a crime? The Bishop of Hippo and Father of the ancient church has, across the centuries, commanded nothing but great respect, however, in this modern day an algorithm detects what it believes is a deep fiaw in his writing and removes it from the public square. It is reckoned that the off ending words were those which reference ‘men [and women] as hopeless creatures’. When I think of the content which is admitted on the pages of social media the idea that an expression of human frailty should fail the test of acceptability is particularly bizarre.

Augustine was reaching for an expression that might lift people from their propensity for the critical judgement of others while settling for second rate standards in themselves. It’s hard to think of anything that might lead to a greater improvement of our character and of our relationships than a humble acknowledgement of the ‘hopeless’ state of our nature alongside an exhortation that we should be on our guard against highlighting the sins of others when we have so much to deal with in ourselves.

Who would have thought that St Augustine could be guilty of such a crime?

You may be delighted to know that following persistent approaches to Facebook and finally a successful appeal, common sense prevailed. Facebook apologised for what they said had been an error and St Augustine’s words were reinstated. A postscript to this tale is the insight it gives into how many of our life choices are controlled by algorithms. Too soon algorithms will be driving our cars and ‘big data’ will know more about us than we know of ourselves. Let’s hope these advanced programmes learn some common sense and can distinguish between profound wisdom and hate speech, but until they do – and that may be never – we need to be very careful of the messages that arrive in our inbox or pop-up on our screens. 