Sincerity : how a moral ideal born five hundred years ago inspired religious wars, modern art, hipster chic, and the curious notion that we all have something to say (no matter how dull)

by R. J. Magill       (Get the Book)
When Sarah Palin told a 2010 radio interviewer that she yearned to connect with the real people, the sincere people, few heard echoes of eighteenth-century romantic Jean-Jacques Rousseau. But Magill did. And here Magill explores the surprising implications of such echoes, tracing the tangled cultural history of sincerity as a moral and emotional ideal. That ideal, readers learn, first emerged in the theological firestorms of the sixteenth-century Reformation but metamorphosed when romantics (Rousseau and Diderot in France; Shelley and Byron in England) invested it with secular meanings in republican politics and emotive literature. But sincerity acquired dark, new connotations when Nietzsche reinterpreted it as a license for ruthless self-assertion, and Freud plumbed its depths for hidden lust and violence. Avoiding the depths, advertisers have transformed sincerity into a marketing formula, while self-help gurus have championed it as a success strategy. No wonder many artists and intellectuals have recast the question of sincerity as one of existential authenticity, while others have retreated into a cagey cynicism! Yet Magill sees Palin as just one of many twenty-first-century Americans on the Left and on the Right who still crave sincerity, even it if they must mask that craving with a hipster's protean irony. A wide-ranging and penetrating cultural inquiry. --Booklist