What's Moral Centrism?

By Author: Clementine
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There are several ways in which Dwight uses the aesthetic to impose a unified spatial and social order. He largely refrains from aestheticizing the work of individual improvement, of Jeffersonian freeholders and agrarian republicans on isolated farms. Improvement for him is an intrinsically social process.13 It leads to a 'softening' and 'polishing' of manners which are invariably credited to a local geographic community. Thus his aesthetic vocabulary resists the centrifugal tendencies of New England history and symbolically draws the striving farmers from their dangerous solitude in the outlands back into the society and surveillance of the center. In this endeavor Dwight exploits the flexibility of the neoclassical idea of beauty as it shades into the later concept of refinement as delineated by Richard Bushman (1993), moving centripetally from smooth and beautiful farmland, to the cluster of houses around the church and school painted in virtuous white, into decorous and tastefully furnished interiors.

More specifically, the visual trope of the picturesque the careful framing and composition of scenes is useful to ...
... Dwight because it entails centripetal connections (such as church-going), spatial bounding (between outlivers and church members), and symbolic disciplining of congregation and community. Here, an attempt has been made to show how Dwight marks out an authoritarian social order by carefully differentiating his aesthetic vocabulary between deferential middling landholders in 'neat' and 'modest' farms, and rural and urban elites marked by pastoral prospects and classicizing architecture. Indeed, for Dwight the very seeing of landscape in aesthetic terms is a hard-won accomplishment of refined observers. Natural leaders (such as Dwight) saw and judged the world through the lens of taste and aesthetics, as did 'the painter and the poet.' Ordinary people were impervious to these fine distinctions and he used the phrase 'beautiful country' only to mean "suited to ... husbandry" (IV, p. 20). Here ordinary people's senses of beauty and goodness, constitutive of self and place (Sack 1997), are erased in favor of what Tuan (1993, p. 8) calls a specialized cultural competence. In Dwight's writings it can also be clearly seen how he expected landscape aesthetics actively to perform work (as D. Mitchell states) in shaping and disciplining people. The example cited above Dwight's mediation on the good effects of architecture on moral character in the Albany is a particularly clear example of his pervasive aesthetic determinism. Here again Dwight's aesthetics are linked to discipline: the supreme individual virtue of self-control, elite social control of a stable and deferential social order, and the education of the same refined aesthetic perception that enables him to see and write his ideal world.

In this sense Dwight enacts and projects onto his portraits of New York and New England what Matless (1998) terms "landscaped citizenship," in which the aesthetic and the social, "the eye and the body," are mutually constituted (Cresswell 2003, p. 280). Dwight's symbolic construction of such citizenship works in a typically ideological way to construct apparent unity, cohesion, social integration and legitimation from difference. The marginal and the excluded - African Americans for example - are mostly (although by no means entirely) absent from his accounts. Elite voices are plentiful. Ordinary voices are rare, and when heard they are presented in ways that underline their subordination. For example, in Dwight's encounters near Claverack outlined above, a snatch of conversation between two men is heard. They are "mere brutes, professedly talking, and actually cursing and swearing, about politics and religion. Of these subjects neither of them knew anything ..."Yet refined behavior or wealth or architectural aspirations can bring all into the orbit of Dwight's approval. Thus, although he reads the heritage and architectural efforts of the Hudson Valley Dutch negatively, those who rise to his (aesthetic) standards of refinement in their wealth, comportment and the architecture of their homes, such as the Patroon Stephen van Rensselaer, are praised unreservedly (II, p. 348).

In perhaps his most extravagant, revealing, and explicitly geographical metaphor Dwight deals with the indispensable groundbreakers, the rough and unchurched pioneers ('Arabian troops') on the frontier of New York. They will follow Native Americans into oblivion. Meditating in a 'handsome seat' in Cazenovia,'4 NY, (Figure 2) Dwight expects these inferior proprietors to remove themselves westward, as "strong columns of civilized men regularly push before them these Arabian troops, and will at no great distance of time follow ... to the Pacific Ocean" (IV, p. 18). With this brutally simple symbolic operation, Dwight inscribes the hoped-for advance of Protestant civilization.

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