On Not Being Special
My mother attended a year of junior college before marrying my father, who worked as a union carpenter. Marriage meant quitting school, and by the age of twenty-three she had birthed both my older brother and me.
Our parents later added a third son, raising us in a quiet working-class neighborhood on the northeast border of Philadelphia. Our little enclave was a planned community built on the remains of a former Quaker settlement where had otherwise stood only a mental asylum.
A Catholic school at the north edge of the neighborhood divided our brick rowhomes from fields that stretched into the suburbs. A mere half-mile to the south, on the other end of a mazelike tunnel of circular streets, stood the public elementary school. Between these were a few thousand indistinguishable houses, twenty-feet wide and two stories each in attached rows of eight or ten. Our ancestries, after two or three generations of mixing among European immigrants, were as uniform as our domiciles. It was thus a small world without racial, economic, or any other real distinction, thus promoting a sense of equality that the broader world would disappoint in due time.
The only visible distinction among the neighborhood kids was whether one was a Catholic or a Public, which is to say whether one wore, as I did, a plaid necktie or jumper to school. So our already small world split in half, my consciousness shrinking to the size of the brick schoolhouse on the city border. The nuns and laywomen who were our teachers at Saint Anselm School - our namesake would soon enough cast a second spell over me - encouraged academic achievement, but they more forcefully discouraged any attendant social distinctions. From a young age we learned rather that the plaid accessories prevented perceptions about wealth or poverty, and after I finished third in a citywide math contest the nuns reminded me, in unambiguous terms, that I was not special.
Our parents and teachers did promote the idea of college education, but for them it was mainly a matter of economic mobility. The key idea was to labor with one’s mind, as this was essentially easier than working with our hands. My father pushed this notion the hardest. We were not to work like he did, but rather to earn our bread otherwise than by pouring concrete for highways. The eventual choice of career should be, he insisted, between law and medicine.
With these values - an unyielding belief in equality, a view of social distinctions as ephemeral, and a socioeconomic theory of education - more or less understood, our parents later sent us to a private high school across the city boundary. My older brother and I thus separated not only from the Publics, but even our fellow neighborhood Catholics. At Holy Ghost Preparatory School - a conservative institution then less than two decades removed from fulltime instruction in Latin -, we found ourselves on the receiving end of an adolescent divide: there were the boys like us from the neighborhoods of northeast Philly, and those from the more affluent suburbs. Replacing the plaid necktie as our tribal badge were now accent, parental occupation, extracurricular activity, and especially scholarly comportment. Here, then, were real differences among people. We Philly kids pronounced ‘water’ like ‘woodr’, and collapsed ‘ow’ into ‘al’. In the mornings I washed my body with woodr and dried it with a tal, and in speech class I refused - as a point of pride - to correct the matter. Maintaining one’s public identity was more important than getting a good grade, and grades too high were for the suburban kids anyway.
Such petty rebellions did not so much disappear in college, but the significance of studiousness reverted to my favor. At Villanova University I was disappointed to discover that I chose, according to my initial evaluation, an institution for rich kids rather than smart kids. So I started to find myself academically - perhaps being removed further from the shadow of my neighborhood mates meant that I could now study without selling out. Soon I found the Philosophy Department, which was vibrant and welcoming. I learned the history of philosophy as well as the idiosyncratic, as I would only later understand, brand of postmodernism then on offer. We undergrads were integrated with the PhD students, and I took graduate-level courses - respectively on Foucault, Spinoza, and Heidegger’s Being and Time - during my final three semesters.
There were some striking social aspects to this particular school of philosophy, which I found unreconcilable with whatever it was that I hoped to gain through the study of books. My early environment had discouraged the sorts of self-promotion and social distinction that seemed so rampant among my peers, and that I still find so curious in scholarly circles. Perhaps not everyone learned in school that they aren’t special. In any case, I struggle to form any notion of what all this reading and writing and talking should lead towards, were it not just human fellowship and mutual enlightenment. All the social and ceremonial aspects of a profession seemed to stand in a stark contrast to any such ideals.
Even more decisive for my path was an inability to form a careerist notion of philosophy. Studying our subject had been a means to reject the socioeconomic theory of education that I learned in youth, while at the same time I preserved the egalitarianism and the skepticism about social distinctions. So when I graduated into the PhD program at the University of Kentucky, it was without much sense of a professional plan. The more I learned about academic class distinctions - the cutting diction and aggressive arm gestures of working-class Philadelphia had long since ceased to appear endearing to others! - the more I divided my sense of scholarship from careerism. My eventual entry into the job market was thus predictably unsuccessful, and it took me much longer to learn professionalization than it did scholarship or teaching.
No doubt there were benefits to these attitudes, just as our vices typically blend with our virtues. My native anti-prestige bias, namely, shielded me from overvaluing the transient goods of academic life, while it made what some call imposter’s syndrome an impossibility: that condition requires the belief that at least someone is special, and I followed my nuns in ruling that out a priori.
Despite my lack of careerism, the six long years on the tenuous track weighed heavily. Through three different temporary positions I managed to finish my book on the ontological argument, and I eventually received a tenure-track offer from the institution at which I had already been teaching. This good fortune, to whatever small extent its causes rest in my actions rather than the whims of the larger world, was no doubt the result more of facility in the classroom than of what I wrote about Anselm’s inference. As others have noted, being first gen is probably an asset when dealing with students. Teaching philosophy demands that we understand the particular humans before us, which is probably more likely the more experience we have of different customs and classes.
During college I had worked on construction sites with my father, where ‘the men’, as we referred to the gender-exclusive labor force, would always repeat the advice of my father: they better not see me after graduation. The entire purpose of schooling was to spare oneself from having to do real work, and real work meant getting your hands dirty and even breaking your back. So there were notions of a sort of class-rising even on the site, but they entailed only exemption from physical labor. One of the many things missing in this advice was any sense that an education might change a person, and much of my life has consisted in a series of slow and belated realizations about this.
The closest thing to a class-consciousness that I learned during those early years was the injunction, a behavioral rather than a cognitive one, to ‘remember where I come from’. But working as a professor did eventually alienate me from family and home. The construction site especially is a distant memory. Probably this is no very specific production of the academic spaces themselves, although I found those to be culturally stifling in my earlier days. More important is the effect of our difficult early career decisions: the path of many academics produces a certain dislocation no matter our starting point. Accepting multiple non-permanent positions in different regions, I repeatedly chose an uncertain prospect over other valuable things such as family and community. Decisions like those have consequences, although sometimes I take comfort in my midcareer recognition that my best philosophical ideas first germinated in conversations with my dad about the construction of a hospital.
Very little of this, I take it, is either specific or inherent to the notion of ‘first gen’, a concept I only discovered after establishing something of a career. The identities of my experience were much more local, like being a Catholic in a neighborhood of Publics or from the city in a school of suburbanites. ‘First gen’, by contrast, refers to the educational level of people other than the one thereby designated, and so forms a strange basis for self-understanding. Perhaps it is less strange than whether one wears a plaid necktie, and I do not mean to underplay the effect, which is well enough documented scientifically, that parental education plays on our material wellbeing. But the notion of first gen at the very least builds too broad a church. What is more interesting is how the twists and turns of our social histories encourage competing narratives and ideals. In my case, for instance, any notions of rising or stories of overcoming - which I fear ‘first gen’ is supposed to epitomize -were excluded from the beginning by the ideals of my teachers (viz., egalitarianism by means of an almost apologetic humility), and the disposition of my neighborhood mates (viz., a stubborn rejection of anyone else’s claims to superiority).
Kevin Harrelson is Professor of Philosophy at Ball State University.
