The Geography of Śānē'
Why the unneighborhood is not an accident
In a previous post I argued that Śānē’ — the Hebrew word our translations flatten into “hate” — names something more structurally precise than contempt. It names the condition of loving less than one owes. Of allocating less attention, less presence, less obligation to those the market has stopped counting. Of maintaining, through habits so ordinary they become invisible, a distance that keeps the neighbor’s need from becoming a claim on the actual structure of one’s life.
I argued that this condition is produced. That seventeen centuries of institutional formation have generated a church remarkably capable of feeling concern for the poor while remaining remarkably insulated from the texture of their lives. That Śānē’ is not primarily a failure of intention but a failure of formation — and that formation, unlike intention, requires more than a decision to correct.
What I want to argue now is that Śānē’ has a geography.
The buffered self — Charles Taylor’s term for the modern condition of experienced self-containment, sealed off from interruption and unwanted claims — does not remain a personal phenomenon. It scales. It becomes architecture. It becomes zoning law, street design, the placement of a fulfillment center beside a residential road, the distance between a plantation-named development and a Title One school two miles away.
The unneighborhood is not a failure of neighborly feeling. It is the geographic expression of a formation into distance that has been operating for centuries. The comfortable suburb did not arrange itself around non-relation by accident. It was built by people who had been formed, institutionally and culturally, to experience self-containment as responsible living — to prize privacy, autonomy, and the management of exposure to others as marks of a life well-ordered.
The church largely blessed this arrangement. More than blessed it — modeled it. The suburban congregation that drives past three neighborhoods to reach its building, parks, worships, and drives home has reproduced in its own institutional life the same logic of managed exposure it inherited from the culture. It is not hostile to its neighbors. It is simply — structurally, habitually, architecturally — organized around not being pressed by them.
That is Śānē’ at institutional scale.
Richard Sennett traced the evacuation of public life — the thinning of shared space, the retreat from accidental encounter, the design of environments that allow people to exist beside one another while remaining largely unformed by the proximity. Jane Jacobs saw it in the postwar American city: the destruction of the mixed-use street, the elimination of the sidewalk, the replacement of the neighborhood with the subdivision. Eric Jacobsen names it theologically: streets are never neutral. They teach people what neighboring is for. And what most streets built in the last seventy years teach is: keep going.
The institutions that shaped this landscape — planning commissions, mortgage markets, highway departments, corporate relocation patterns — were not conspiring against community. They were operating according to a logic of efficiency, throughput, and managed circulation that the broader culture had already sanctified. The geography followed the formation. It always does.
Which is why you cannot fix the unneighborhood with a neighboring program.
This is the Moral Hinge argument applied to geography: the institutional accommodation of distance has been so thorough, so long-running, and so structurally embedded that it cannot be reversed by changing how people feel about their neighbors. Formation produced the distance. Only formation can close it.
What that formation looks like — mundane, repeated, embodied, resistant to the logic of throughput — is a different post. The practices exist. The tradition has not forgotten them, though the institution has largely stopped practicing them.
But the diagnosis must precede the prescription. And the diagnosis, stated plainly, is this:
The neighborhoods we inhabit did not become incapable of relation by accident. They were built by people formed into distance, blessed by institutions accommodated to it, and sustained by a church that mostly forgot it had a different way of inhabiting space.
Śānē’ lives on the street. It has a zip code. And in most American communities, it has been there long enough that nobody remembers when it arrived.
That, the tradition insists, is precisely when it becomes most dangerous.
Peter Hamm served as Chief Clerk of the Committee on Rules of the United States House of Representatives and spent twenty years in corporate leadership. He is pursuing a Master of Christian Leadership at Leland Theological Seminary, with a vocational horizon in hospice chaplaincy and care ministry. He is completing a book, The Moral Hinge, on the history of Christian economic accommodation.
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