There are a lot of reasons “The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part” flopped.
No sequel could match the unexpected delight of the first installment, “The Lego Movie,” released in 2014. Also, “The Second Part” was kind of a downer.
Lately, I keep thinking about its anthem, “Everything’s Not Awesome.”
It’s a response to the first movie’s contagious earworm, “Everything Is Awesome,” which is not actually about things being awesome but a deconstruction of the pressures of conformity and forced enthusiasm. But it’s awfully catchy, so if you missed the social satire part, that’s OK.
Its successor is a heartfelt lament, a recognition that things in America in 2019 weren’t so hot.
In retrospect, that seems awfully quaint.
I don’t think anyone likes how America feels these days.
Right now, Republicans are riding high on across-the-board election wins – the presidency, the U.S. Senate, the Michigan House and an expanded majority in the U.S. House.
But these victories came after a multiyear campaign rooted in the premise that the other half of America, depending on where you’re standing, urgently seeks the country’s demise. Four years ago, and two years after that, it was Democrats on top, confident they had been the ones to rebuff an existential threat.
There’s a visceral pleasure in victory, but it doesn’t last. And it doesn’t find solutions.
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We all know that times are hard, but we don’t agree on why, who’s to blame or what’s to be done. We cast our fellow Americans in absurd extremes, assuming the worst possible motivations.
“We’re looking at our fellow Americans as the enemy,” pollster Richard Czuba of the Glengariff Group told me this summer, after a poll he had just concluded found that a startling number of Michiganders believed political violence was justified – not if they believed an election had been stolen, but when it simply didn’t go their way.
We live in the same country, sometimes the same streets or houses, and if we are going to have a future, we have to find a way to do it together.
It was in vogue, a few years back, to talk about civility. That’s not entirely misguided. We scream at each other a lot. Our culture is coarser than it ever has been, which I don’t love, though I laughed right along with everyone else when one of our Detroit Lions flipped the double bird at the other team’s jeering fans after a bad call.
Yet civility has always seemed like a ribbon on a pig. When we’re accusing each other of hating America, denying each other rights or pursuing politics or policy built on indifference to each others’ humanity, does it matter whether we do it nicely?
I think what we lack is empathy, the willingness to truly see each other as fully human as ourselves. We’ve decided that some groups of people aren’t worth our care, whether it’s undocumented immigrants or MAGA voters, and we operate accordingly.
If I’m right, there’s good news – it’s possible to learn empathy. And bad news – you have to want to.
Freud may have thought sex and death were humans’ primal motivations, but our understanding of humanity has evolved, Royal Oak private practice clinical psychologist and University of Detroit adjunct professor Carrie Nantais explained: What humans need most is connection.
And we can’t do that without empathy.
“It’s the most important human ability we have,” she said.
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Empathy isn’t an innate emotion. It’s an adaptive behavioral response that allows us to not just understand, but feel another’s experience ourselves, Nantais said: “Sympathy is, I go to a friend’s husband’s funeral and I feel sorry for my friend. Empathy is, I recall my parents’ passing, how utterly powerful that is, and then I can really respond to my friend’s grief because I remember what it was like to feel that emotion myself. It’s a more intense feeling. It’s harder to regulate, because it comes from the self, yet it allows us to build stronger connections because my actions are built on my own experiences.”
Most of us naturally acquire empathy as children, through the care of our family members. But some of us don’t. As a therapist, helping patients develop or deepen empathy is part of Nantais’ job.
Empathy can be deeply personal, she explained – “If I have empathy for my child or my spouse, I’m more motivated to help them” – but there’s a broader application: Empathy allows us to use our emotional understanding to see another person’s pain or suffering, or to identify injustice, all essential to connection.
Judgment is antithetical to empathy, Nantais said, even when it’s a pronouncement about behavior we find inexplicable. Curiosity is a step forward.
“If we can say, ‘I see why you did that,’ we develop empathy, quickly,” she said.
We speak of our emotions in imprecise terms, Nantais said, using an inadequate social lexicon that hobbles our quest for connection: “People will say, ‘I’m frustrated.’ OK, are you frustrated because you went to Honey Bee Market and they don’t have chili lime chips, or because Mitch McConnell got reelected? There’s a spectrum, and there’s a whole language that describes feelings, and we probably only use 12.”
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It’s equally important to understand when and why we choose not to employ empathy.
Sometimes, we don’t trust the other person and worry that if we empathize, we’ll be taken advantage of, lied to or manipulated.
Sometimes, we worry we’ll be hurt. We might be afraid of the change that comes with empathy, when we understand the pain others feel. Or that, if we understood how a set of beliefs or behavior affected others, we’d have to change, and we just don’t want to.
Then there’s anger.
Anger, Nantais said, rebuffs empathy. Right now, Americans are very angry.
“We struggle with empathy for the other because there is a lot of anger in our context,” she said. “We can’t get to the point of empathy.”
When we’re angry, most of us aren’t proud of it. So we look for outside causes, reasons the anger we feel isn’t our fault. Sometimes, we blame a convenient other.
And we don’t know how to manage our anger.
Anger should be like a red light at an intersection, Nantais said. No one is mad at a red light. We understand the signal, and what it is telling us to do, to stay safe – look around and pay attention to what’s going on.
Anger should be the same, a prompt that tells us to stop and investigate our own emotions.
“But we don’t do that,” Nantais said. “We only pay attention to the volcano.”
So where does that leave us, in our angry, disconnected America?
Sometimes, limiting empathy is self-protective. There is so much pain in the world, and we can’t feel all of it. That’s a normal part of emotional management.
But when it’s writ large, across broad segments of what should be a shared culture, when we tell ourselves it’s OK to write off large groups of our fellow Americans, Nantais said, “bad things happen.”
And, yes, I suppose civility does play a part.
“We have to stop deriding people. We have to stop calling people vermin,” Czuba told me this summer. “The coarsening of our language didn’t just happen, it happened over time, because we allowed it. It’s an individual decision, every single day.”
We need perspective, Czuba said. And sometimes, we need to just cool it.
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Both Czuba and Nantais talked about the importance of communal activities: sports or volunteer work, spiritual or civic connections. All has been eroded by the self-segregation of our communities in real life and online.
Developing empathy, Nantais said, is some of the hardest work a person can do. You have to work at it, and you have to want to do the work.
So maybe we can start by recognizing what we do have in common. There are certainly unrepentant, unpleasant people in our world, filled with hate and out for anger. But I believe that most of us want the same things – safety, some degree of prosperity, a better life for our kids, if we have them – we just disagree about how to get there. There’s almost always one thing you can like or at least respect about a person; often, once you’ve found one thing, more follow.
I’ll admit that at times, I’ve been part of the problem. Too quick to anger, too quick to judge. Too ready to write too many people off.
But I think I can do better. And I think you can, too.
Nancy Kaffer is the editorial page editor of the Detroit Free Press, where this column originally appeared.
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This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: America needs civility. But it needs empathy more | Opinion
