Tim Shriver urges leaders to choose dignity over division

As they navigate this challenging time in America, the path through divisiveness and toward preserving democracy involves embracing other people’s dignity, keynote speaker Timothy Shriver told more than 1,000 local leaders during Connect 351 on Jan. 23 in Boston.

Shriver, chair of the Special Olympics and CEO and founder of UNITE, highlighted his work in co-creating the Dignity Index, a tool that scores speech along a continuum ranging from dignity to contempt. The index is designed to help both political leaders and citizens rethink the language they use to describe people with opposing views.

The Dignity Index is part of Shriver’s mission to overcome the contempt that he says is poisoning civic life, and to offer strategies for bridging divisions and seeing each other’s humanity.

“You can’t love this country and then hate your fellow Americans,” Shriver said, adding that confronting contempt and dehumanization is just as important as every other policy and political issue that leaders face.

“We’ve got to choose dignity,” Shriver said. “If you want to solve problems, and get the best ideas from the other side, we’ve got to treat them with dignity. There is no America without democracy, and there’s no democracy without faith, and that depends on dignity.”

UNITE works with political leaders, school districts, businesses and institutions to help ease divisions, prevent violence, and solve problems. Shriver created the Dignity Index in 2021 with Tami Pyfer and Tom Rosshirt. (Pyfer at the Women Elected Municipal Officials Leadership Luncheon at Connect 351, and Shriver and Pyfer recorded an episode of the MMA’s “The 351” podcast.)

A nephew of the late President John F. Kennedy and U.S. Senators Robert F. Kennedy and Ted Kennedy, Boston-born Shriver emphasized his Massachusetts connections, cheering on the New England Patriots and giving a shout-out to local officials from Barnstable, home to the iconic Kennedy Compound in Hyannisport.

Shriver, who hosts the “Need a Lift?” podcast, has dedicated himself to confronting what he calls a “contempt industrial complex” that whips up widespread resentment and hooks people on contempt. “We’re all getting tricked,” he said, by partisan media outlets and manipulative algorithms that feed misleading information and tap into people’s baser instincts.

“We judge a lot as human beings, but sometimes judgment goes from trying to gauge the situation to separation, to superiority and even to dehumanization,” he said. “I would suggest that right now, we are in what I would call a culture of contempt, a culture where judgment and demonization and dehumanization have become normative.”

Shriver estimated that 100 million Americans have disowned family members and friends with differing political views, while trust in government and all institutions is collapsing.

“Contempt is a toxin that is eating away at the social and cultural and trust and familial fabric for all of us,” he said.

The antidote, he said, is treating people with dignity.

The Dignity Index is an eight-point scale that measures speech according to how much it does, or doesn’t, embrace the humanity of people from different groups or opposing views. Speech that scores five or higher reaches toward dignity, while speech registering at four or below pushes toward contempt. In his talk, Shriver asked the audience to score quotes from historical and public figures.

The “country is starving” for more dignity in public and private life, he said, with polls showing that 80% or more of respondents agree on basic political principles, including the importance of fact-based information and compromise.

During a question-and-answer session, local leaders asked about practical applications of Shriver’s index, particularly in a time of authoritarian threats and dehumanizing messages. Alex Pratt, Malden’s director of strategic planning and community development, asked how to address the disconnect between a local government and the public.

“How do you engage with the community, where you have divisions that you described, of people getting totally different sets of facts, sets of information?” Pratt asked. “How do you apply the index more broadly to a larger group of people?”

Shriver urged community leaders to create a “subculture of dignity” that they can model for the public. He also suggested using the index as a mirror to examine one’s own speech, and relying on trusted people to hold them accountable.

Treating opponents with dignity doesn’t mean acquiescing in the face of ethical or moral threats, Shriver said. It’s important to call out unjust and dehumanizing behaviors, policies and programs.

“Ironically, treating people with dignity actually unleashes you to hold them accountable for their policies, and their programs and their actions, because you’ve gone around the easy road, which is to just call them names,” Shriver said. “What does [calling names] hold them accountable for? Nothing. You’ve called them names and you’ve given them a pass on their point of view.”