Book: Clearing the Ground

Overview
Sydney J. Harris’s 1986 collection Clearing the Ground gathers a late-career selection of his brief, polished newspaper essays, each aimed at removing the weeds of cant, cliché, and confusion that choke everyday thinking. Harris, a longtime Chicago columnist known for humane skepticism and lucid prose, ranges across education, ethics, language, culture, and civic life. The title signals the book’s method and mission: clear away what is obstructive so that sound judgment, responsibility, and compassion can take root.

Context and Purpose
Appearing in the waning years of the Cold War and amid the growth of consumerism and media spectacle, the collection answers a culture saturated with noise. Harris’s pieces resist ideological sorting; he favors a moral center over partisan reflex, urging readers to examine assumptions before defending them. He writes for general readers who sense that technical progress and rising information do not automatically produce wisdom, and for teachers, parents, and citizens who feel the civic fabric fraying under quick certainty and shallow debate.

Major Themes
A central theme is the distinction between knowledge and wisdom. Harris argues that education worth the name cultivates judgment, breadth, and character, not just the amassing of facts or vocational skills. He returns often to the pairing of rights and responsibilities, insisting that a healthy democracy requires both civic freedom and self-restraint. He probes success and failure with suspicion, preferring fulfillment to achievement measured in status or income, and he questions the worship of busyness that leaves little time for reflection. The book also treats the uses and abuses of language, showing how euphemism and sloppy phrasing blur thinking and weaken public life. Throughout, Harris prizes civility and curiosity, the willingness to change one’s mind, and the modesty to acknowledge uncertainty.

Style and Structure
The essays are short, conversational, and aphoristic, often sparked by a classroom moment, a news item, a remembered anecdote, or a stray word looked up in a dictionary. Harris’s voice balances urbane wit with moral seriousness. He favors careful distinctions, illustrative contrasts, and the quiet surprise of a final turn. Classical allusions and references to literature, music, and history appear not as ornaments but as tools for orientation, anchoring contemporary concerns in a longer tradition.

Representative Topics
Pieces explore why schooling that ignores character misses its highest aim, how freedom becomes self-defeating without norms, and why certainty is the most dangerous of convictions. He examines technology as a means rather than an end, questions whether progress in convenience masks regress in empathy, and challenges a culture that treats disagreement as hostility. Other essays reflect on the everyday courtesies that create social trust, the necessity of solitude for thought, the temptations of cynicism, and the difference between skepticism that tests claims and nihilism that dismisses them. He is alert to the pressures that pit practicality against idealism, and he repeatedly argues that the best public life requires both.

Enduring Appeal
Clearing the Ground endures because it models how to think rather than what to think. Its pages do not chase headlines; they ask what habits of mind make headlines less bewildering. Harris’s steady attention to language, education, and character reads as a quiet counterprogramming to speed and spectacle. The result is a book that feels companionable rather than prescriptive, a guide for readers who want to keep their balance, keep learning, and keep faith with the better possibilities of common life.