by Matthew Sitman
Rachel Shteir reviews a new book on the history of sincerity, with insights stretching from Machiavelli to Millennials:
For several centuries, sincerity was alternately celebrated and reviled. Machiavelli advised princes that they need only look sincere, since it was unlikely that any peasants would get close enough to tell the difference. (This has a familiar ring.) Montaigne was the first to prize sincerity enough to write about himself as he really was. The most appealing seventeenth-century commentator on the subject is La Rochefoucauld, whose maxims zero in on how easy it is to fake sincerity and how hard it is to be sincere. For instance: “What usually passes for sincerity is only an artful pretense designed to win the confidence of others.”
The topic's relevance for today? Hipsters, of course:
Magill is right to explain the Millennials’ embrace of hipsterism as a sincerity-desiring defense for a generation that has “grown up in the shadow of a culture that values economics and consumption over the values of humanism and artistic enterprise.” In other words, as the Recession narrowed young peoples’ choices, they began to flail around for anything not connected to a dead-end job—even if the real thing thing they settled on was ultimately fake. (Wearing a wifebeater does not make you James Dean.) And yet Magill’s analysis of hipsterism is ultimately dissatisfying, putting into relief how anemic—even how ironic—hipsterism is.
The Dish 