With respect to society, the democratic tradition with all its values is theoretically oriented to a universal horizon. Its values of liberty, equality, and fraternity are realized on this planet only rarely, poorly, and hypocritically; in any case they are not mainly about the poor, although civil rights have generally spread beyond the bourgeois world as if a reservoir had overflowed. The citizen is at the center of democratic values. In practice and in historical reality, especially in the current process of globalization, democracy as it is historicized today in impoverishing the middle classes and drowning the poor, excluding them, depriving them of reality.
In discourse about democracy, the rule of law, and the future of the economy–however true or false it may be–the poor may be mentioned, but they are never seen as central to society’s aspirations, let alone as an inspiration to the society. And the discourse never attempts to integrate civic democracy with “partiality to the poor.” Instead of language that favors the poor it uses the language of the common good, thus diluting the reality of the poor. Western democracies have reduced some of the manifestations of poverty, but they have never made the poor central in theory or in practice. I believe this is why they have been unable to eradicate such evils as isolationist individualism, the trivialization of existence, the fragmentation of the human family. When the poor are not at the center, the neither is compassion. And without compassion, humanness also disappears.
Jon Sobrino, Where Is God?: Earthquake, Terrorism, Barbarity, and Hope, trans. Margaret Wilde (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books), 2004.
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