Discouragement by the success of moralizing and debased perfectionism
creates, in good enough hearts, a familiar, even common,
cynicism.  I think of a moment in Howard Hawks's film _His Girl
Friday_ in which one reporter reads aloud to the gathering of fellow
reporters in the press room the beginning of a story left unfinished
in a typewriter by the one woman reporter in the group (played by
Rosalind Russell) after she has left the room to accompany and
comfort (another) victimized woman.  It is a moment given revelatory
status, the fast-talking, all-knowing reporters depicted as
communally stilled in the presence of genuine sentiment genuinely
recorded.  The one who breaks that mood is marked by that fact as a
spiritual outsider.  What he says to break the communal is, ``I don't
think it's ethical to read somebody else's work.''  And he is answered,
``Where do you get that ethics stuff?  You're the only one who'll
swipe any of it.''  It is a complex moment.  That the outsider is
narratively set apart by cliche homosexual signs of difference is no
doubt part of Hawkes's tough-guy posture and worldview; if so,
Hawkes tenderly contests it by the communal spokesman's implied
confession that he (they) not only would not but cannot steal the
woman's access to the realities of sentiment her writing has
recorded.  Their toughness cannot afford it.  Complexities aside, this
perception of the communal as spoiled by the moralistic is a perfectionist
moment, underscored when the woman's ``editor'' (played by Cary Grant)
notes the rumors of a new mayor cleaning up the city of ``New York'';
evidently, for them, a Utopian vision.  The cynical rebuke of
hypocrisy, in a scene of democratic corruption, forms a counterpart --
about as remote as the dimensions of Western theater permit, yet
continuous -- with Socrates' speculation, in the city of words
passage, that the good city exists always as a model to the good
soul, and his claim that the philosopher will participate in
the public affairs of only that city, toward which his interlocutor
seems to express some reservation.  Of course the claim to be willing
to participate in a city if, but only if, it is good, is a convenient
story for a bunch of born outsiders, say like these reporters, to
tell themselves.  It has its convenience for intellectuals generally.
The point of the moment for me, Socratic and Hawksian, is its glimpse of
perfectionist aspiration as calling on, or remembering, the wish for
participation in the city, as if its moral task is to show the ground
on which to withstand its invitation to cynicism.  Perfectionism is
the dimension of moral thought directed less to restraining the bad
than to releasing the good, as from a despair of good (of good and
bad in each of us).  If there is a perfection not only compatible
with democracy but necessary to it, it lies not in excusing democracy
for its inevitable failures, or looking to rise above them, but in
teaching how to respond to those failures, and to one's compromise
by them, otherwise than by excuse or withdrawal.

Stanley Cavell
_Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome : The Constitution of Emersonian
Perfectionism_ pp.17-18

This is not a particular moral demand, but the condition of
democratic morality; it is what that dimension of representativeness
of democracy comes to which is not delegatable.  It is the force
of Emerson's endless harping on the individual as inheriting
the predicates of majesty (autonomy, authority, bearing,
magnetism, followers), why his message to the scholar is to
raise and cheer, as if the alternative is not to be ineffectual
(which one might either fear or desire), but to depress and
cynicize and ironize, which in a democracy are political
emotions.  So that conformity is not a mere lack of community,
but its parody, learning and teaching the wrong thing of
and to one another.

p.125