Utah pilot program to incentivize dignity, reject contempt

From dignityindex.us

LOGAN — Former Logan City council member and former education advisor to Governor Herbert, Tami Pyfer, has a new job: representing a statewide organization that could be known as the Dignity Project. They have launched what is termed the Dignity Index.

On KVNU’s For the People program on Wednesday, Pyfer talked about what’s involved.

“It’s taken about two years to really put this all together. people have thought about it, it’s just a lot of hard work to do it, and to have all the right pieces come together. I don’t think we can overstate what impact, if this idea catches on, the impact that we could have on our public discourse,” she explained.

Pyfer said a midwestern congressman talked about the idea last summer.

“They were talking with groups like ‘Braver Angels’ and people that are trying to heal these divides. Congressman Emanuel Cleaver, he’s from Missouri, and he said ‘there are agencies and organizations that score us on everything we do, except there’s not one single organization that scores us on how we speak to each other.’ He said, ‘they don’t score us on decency and civility,’ and so he just comes to the conclusion that that’s not important. And he followed that by saying, ‘if you started giving us a score, we’d start paying attention to it.’”

The way it will work is a scale, from 1 to 8, that will not look at partisan bias rhetoric or whether it is coming from a Democrat or Republican, but rating any signs of contempt or disparaging of one’s opponent, and then giving it a number on the dignity scale.

“(It’s) been a lot of work, reading a lot of writers and thinkers and behavioral scientists and social scientists, and words matter. It’s very well documented on the language that can lead us to war, to genocide, it’s the words that we use that matter. Or the language that can lead us toward, they call it civility, but’s that also a low bar. It’s like being civil to someone is one thing, but having treatment with dignity is a much higher bar.”

You can find out more information at DignityIndex.us.

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