IDEAL LIVES

People are not simply who they claim to be. Indeed, we cannot understand social action simply by taking claims to identity and status at face value; what makes news on Page 1 may be merely a shadow of, or distraction from, subtler, but more important, patterns. But claims and narratives of identity are not irrelevant. As representations of goals and ideals, ideal lives provide targets for self-formation and for the evaluation of others throughout a human lifespan. Ideal lives permit and bracket an agent's participation in life-projects. Paradoxically, they can exercise tremendous power even when they merely provide an ideal narrative, by exerting a creative tension which directs people's energies: in a society of divorced, apartment-dwelling urban single parents believing that “normal” families live in family homes in small towns; in a society in which laws are theoretically ratified by all voters though written and shepherded through legislatures by a few; or in an egalitarian tribal society in which all, theoretically, become elders although in fact mortality, social exclusion, or the vagaries of the curriculum vitae prevent all but a few from doing so (Kelly 1993).