The New Sincerity is not new. In embracing it, I’m late to the game. A lot of groups and movements have laid claim to the term, but I believe Jesse Thorn of The Sound of Young America has dibs on The New Sincerity, or at least he’s the leading proponent of it.

Jesse explains this ethos thoroughly in his Manifesto. I would add to it only this, that The New Sincerity is in fact very similar to irony, but is its mirror-twin. I think irony and The New Sincerity come from the same place, an awareness of our essential naïveté and our vulnerability as emotional, feeling creatures. Irony, however, is rooted in shame — a rejection of our essential selves, as a means of self-protection as well as ego-boosting compensation for a deeper self-loathing.

Irony rejects sincere feeling as a weakness of chumps and suckers. It’s rooted in a fundamental spiritual pain, in mistrust and cynicism. By its very nature, irony is a denial of self. It’s a profoundly conservative mindset, one that is intensely aware of social mores and propriety. We look at, say, Paul Engemann’s “Push It To The Limit,” and celebrate it ironically — we love the cheesiness! — in order to intellectually rationalize some deeply rooted, far uncooler sense that, in fact, we on some level would in fact like to (unironically) push it to the limit.

The New Sincerity, on the other hand, looks at the same emotional glass and proclaims, “half-full!” It celebrates what irony seeks to obliterate. It takes joy in life without the layers of self-consciousness that the ironist must contend with. For the ironist, anything good in life must pass through a maze of hipness security checkpoints and coolness screenings before being admitted to the inner sanctum. The New Sinceritist, on the other hand, leaves her front door completely unlocked, for all to enter freely.

I have come to believe that The New Sincerity is critical to my growth as a human being and Mensch. Truth be told, I’ve been moving in this direction for many years, although my movement has been hampered by something I’ve only recently (meaning today) identified as a competing ethos, which I will name and then dismiss as New Seriousness. (In brief: I think two competing anti-irony forces blossomed after 9/11. One was sincerity; the other was seriousness. I thought I was a fairly sincere person, but in fact I was merely serious. There is a difference.)

The New Sincerity allows for unfiltered joy in existence, a guileless appreciation for all that is wonderful and amusing in the world. In essence, it rejects the (bracingly punk but ultimately dead-end) Fight Club slogan of “you are not a beautiful and unique snowflake.” Instead, it proclaims that, in fact, you are a beautiful, unique snowflake. You (you) have something valuable and special to contribute to the world.

It allows for a relationship with other human beings that is grounded, not in judgment, but in curiosity. It assumes the best in people, an awareness that everyone, not just the cleverest or the most talented in some ability, has the capacity, not only to feel joy and delight, but to communicate it to others.

In celebrating The New Sincerity, I’m not trying to evangelize it. I don’t have to. Look around the Internet. The New Sincerity has already won. Everything from Boing Boing to Lolcats embodies the New Sincerity ethos. Like I said, I’m late to the game. The New Sincerity is already well underway.

People speculate about what comes after postmodernism. I think it’s The New Sincerity. Postmodernism represents the endpoint of pre-Internet Western culture — a culture defined by a top-down flow of art and ideas, where a few acknowledged masters, so designated by cultural gatekeepers, create art to be consumed by the grateful masses. The New Sincerity, on the other hand, is bottom-up. Here, the masses are in charge, in the sense that no one is in charge. In this new cultural universe, some complete stranger can make and upload a video of a surprised kitten and get more attention than a Hollywood blockbuster, and end up being referenced by a well-known actress on a national talk show!

It’s no longer a relatively small intellectual elite that gets to decide what’s cool anymore. Now it’s ten million random weirdos out there, creating weird, random stuff that captivates us in ways nobody can predict. In other words, what comes after PoMo is NoMo.

Like many old fogies, I’ve been ambivalent about The New Sincerity. There’s something about unalloyed appreciation of things that rankles the contrarian in me. I read about people spending countless hours building insanely elaborate Lego sculptures, and I shake my head. But that’s wrongthink. If my goal in life is to become a bitter, angry crank, destined to die unmourned having left behind a legacy of empty snark, then OK, fine, I’m right on track.

But if I want to be pro-creativity, pro-human, and pro-joy, then there’s only one way forward.