Meryl Streep, MMA and Empathy

Have you ever wanted to understand another person so much that you sacrifice elements of your own life that make you happiest? I’m not talking about making sacrifices to help another person — just to understand them, to deeply comprehend where they are coming from. What they love. What they want. What they fear.

That’s what actors do. When he was filming Taxi Driver, Robert de Niro got his New York cabbie license. He worked 12 hour shifts driving a cab to prepare for the role, and — legend says — used to pick up fares during breaks from filming. While shooting One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Jack Nicholson and some of his fellow cast members would spend the night at the psychiatric hospital. We all have some baseline human empathy, but to truly understand someone in a way that allows you to pretend convincingly to be that person — well, that’s impressive. I see what makes it worth doing, but I don’t understand the process.

Which brings me to one of the best actors ever: Meryl Streep. Yesterday, during the course of a far longer talk at the Golden Globes, Streep threw off some asinine remarks about mixed martial arts. She was wrong, of course, and it was an unforced error — one stupid sentence set off from a broader speech, but one that happened to insult a passionate (if niche) community. Two great pieces have already been published about this: Chris Zahar’s Jiu-Jitsu Times article explains what Streep got wrong, while the inimitable Jack Slack presents a vigorous and devastatingly argued defense of MMA as art. Those pieces are both spot-on. I don’t want to revisit that ground, so let me focus on one aspect of this mess: ignorance.

That’s what led Streep into this morass. We can say with near-100 percent certainty that Meryl Streep has no idea we’re even upset. If she did, she probably wouldn’t know why. Being ignorant doesn’t mean you’re stupid. It means you’re simply unaware of the realities of life as other people live it. That’s the source of so many human problems, it’s hard to list them all.

I’ve thought a lot about the power of empathy. It’s a mysterious and valuable resource of the human species.

It’s the necessary connective tissue that binds us together in communities. We don’t have to agree with or like the same things, and the world would be boring if we did — but it’s incumbent upon me to try to understand that other people can like things I don’t like, and their feelings are legitimate. I’m a secular person, but I know intelligent, committed, religious people who are among the best people I’ve met. These folks may never agree with my atheism, but because we participate in each other’s lives and talk openly — not dismissively — with each other, they can see where I’m coming from and even that we share values. This wouldn’t happen if either of us just sneered at the other.

To be frank, I understand why Streep could say something like this. I see this type of bubble effect happen all the time in the various communities I participate in, where someone will take a shot at whoever they think the out-group is. In Streep’s circles, I’ll bet not a lot of people are dropping $50 to watch Cody Garbrand dethrone the virtuoso Dominick Cruz (besides David Mamet, I guess). Even if they did, it wouldn’t look like art to them unless someone they respect took the time to explain it to them (… so, David Mamet …). If you’ve never trained, and if you don’t know people who train, you probably can’t tell the difference between a Tough Man contest and a fight that’s a technical masterpiece. To learn takes time. Coincidentally, Streep made her remarks when she was receiving a lifetime achievement award, speaking of time and commitment to craft.

This is why I’m most upset at Streep: She of all people should be able to understand that people vastly unlike her enrich her lives with martial arts. Her life’s work is putting herself inside the minds of other people, and here she is dropping a cheap, throwaway joke that plays into stereotypes. It was her taking an unprovoked shot at people that she assumed wouldn’t be in her intended audience. This is pretty weak.

In her speech, Streep defines art, and talks about the profound feelings it stirs. One of my favorite guests, D’Juan Owens, talked eloquently about how he loves art — all art — from dance to music to visual arts to, yes, the highest levels of martial arts. They’re all forms of creative expression. Fewer than 48 hours ago, I answered a question on the podcast about crying on the mats, and said that no one should ever be ashamed of it.

I mean that. Passion is a great human quality, and jiujitsu can be frustrating to learn, and I don’t care if anybody cries or bleeds or vomits while we’re training with each other: I care that they come back. I want them to have what I have, the sense of personal development and discipline I get from training. I want them to know what I know: that you can make yourself smarter and tougher and kinder and more patient. More empathic, too. Many gyms, mine included, throw together people who might never interact in any other facet of life. But we get to know each other this way and we become family. Truly, one of the greatest facets of jiujitsu is that it punctures social bubbles. That’s a terrific way to build understanding and, yes, empathy.

You know that line I wrote above, about the power of empathy? I stole it. You know who I got it from?

I’ll give you a hint: you’re probably pretty mad at her right now.

The full bit unedited goes like this. “I’ve thought a lot about the power of empathy. In my work, it’s the current that connects me and my actual pulse to a fictional character in a made-up story. It allows me to feel, pretend feelings and sorrows and imagined pain. And my nervous system is sympathetically wired, and it conducts that current to you, sitting in a movie theater, and to the woman sitting next to you, and to her friend, so that we all feel that it’s happening to us at the same time. It’s a very mysterious and valuable resource of the human species.”

Trying to meet people where they are is a core test of empathy. It’s ironic that one of the best ever at understanding the lives of other human beings and conveying them on screen failed this basic test. (Once. This week. Possibly not forever.)

Understanding something, even empathizing with it, doesn’t mean agreement, or even acceptance. Maybe football’s not your thing, and that’s fine. Maybe you’ll never fully appreciate what it took for De Niro and Nicholson to give up their daily lives, or what it took for Christian Bale to lose 60 pounds for The Machinist (actually, given that we’ve all cut weight, maybe that’s not the best example).

In figuring out how to respond to this, though, I think of this basic principle: Most of life isn’t what happens, but how you respond to what happens. That’s the question we face as a community: How do we respond to people who say smug and ignorant things like this?I frankly am not that concerned about the effect of this incident upon Meryl Streep, but I am concerned about the next time someone you know says something conceited and dismissive about MMA or jiujitsu. You can write them out of your circle and say something curt about something they love — or you can show them what’s amazing about this thing that you love.

Where MMA is concerned, the Jack Slack article is a great start.If you were a method actor, there are things you would need to know about me: I love jiujitsu more than just about anything, and I’m curious about just about everything. Which means when it comes to non-jiujitsu topics, I’m often ignorant. When I say things like this, I’d rather people educate me and draw me into their circle so I can begin to know the things they know. I might not see the world exactly the way they do, but I might start to see how they see.

And if you were a method actor, I’d hope you’d already know how to puncture your own bubble and do exactly that.