Loving our Neighbor(hood)s: An Architecture of Altruism
James K.A. Smith, Professor of Philosophy
Comment Magazine
August 2007

When Jesus summarizes "the greatest commandment," it is a two-fold obligation that hinges on love: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart" and "You shall love your neighbour as yourself" (Luke 10:27, echoing Leviticus 19:18). It is intriguing to me that when Jesus points to the centrality of love, he also invokes a metaphor which is not familial ("brother" or "friend") or ethnic ("your people"), but almost geographical: we are to love the neighbour—the one next to us, who happens (by providence) to be in proximity. The neighbour could be a friend or an enemy, a foreigner or a brother. The call to the love the neighbour is a call to love all of them—that is why all of Jesus' injunctions to love are taken up in the call to love the neighbour.

But if we're honest, the geography of this injunction must sound strange for a culture that dwells in "executive" homes on cul-de-sacs with heated garages and massive decks in the backyard. North American culture increasingly inhabits the kind of world where we not only don't know our neighbours, we never even see them. Many denizens of late modern culture emerge bleary-eyed from bed before dawn, grab a travel mug of coffee while running out the door into the attached garage, and click the electronic opener to begin the daily commute. According to the recent Commuting in America III report, for 75% of people this is a journey that happens alone, in a private vehicle. So we begin our day in isolation: the transition from home to garage to vehicle to expressway is insulated from any contact with others. When we get home, there's little difference. The culture of "automobility" engenders a residential architecture where the three-car garage swallows almost the entire front elevation, leaving a small gap for a front door—but eliminating any room for an expansive front porch. Instead, houses are set back from the street, guarded by the fortress-like wall of garage doors, leaving us to retreat to the privacy of fenced backyards on sprawling decks—once again, insulated by pressure-treated lumber from any contact with our neighbours. Thus, our suburban "neighbourhoods" are all too often collections of privatized, insulated pods that secure us from any contact with "neighbours." In such a world, Jesus' command sounds a tad anachronistic and strange.

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