Book: For the Time Being

Overview
Sydney J. Harris’s For the Time Being (1972) gathers a brisk, humane cross section of his syndicated newspaper columns from the late 1960s and early 1970s. Rather than a single argument, it offers a mosaic of short essays that weigh the claims of reason and feeling against the daily pressures of modern life. The title signals Harris’s double concern: the moment we inhabit and the moral steadiness needed to inhabit it well. He writes as a public thinker at street level, addressing readers directly, testing fashionable assumptions, and returning to perennial questions about education, civility, and conscience.

Themes
Education is Harris’s most persistent theme. He presses for a liberal education that enlarges sympathy and judgment, not merely a technical training that sharpens tools. He argues that learning should transform self-absorption into outward vision, and that schools fail when they treat information as an end instead of a means to human growth. Closely tied to this is his insistence on language as a moral instrument. Sloppy words make for sloppy thinking, and euphemisms conceal harm; he urges clarity not as pedantry but as a guardrail for public life.

Harris returns often to the tension between progress and purpose. He admires science, yet worries about a culture that moves faster than it thinks. Technology, he suggests, magnifies impulses already present; without cultivated character, new powers only scale up old mistakes. He scrutinizes television’s passivity, advertising’s manipulations, and the narcotic effect of novelty, asking whether convenience is crowding out contemplation.

Ethics for Harris is practical and personal. He favors small, steady acts over grand gestures: admitting error, listening carefully, giving others the benefit of the doubt. Against cynicism, he proposes a seasoned hopefulness; against tribal certainty, a habit of self-suspicion. He distinguishes patriotism from nationalism, conviction from dogmatism, skepticism from sneering disbelief. The through line is reciprocity: a refusal to treat the other as an abstraction.

Style and Structure
The pieces are short, polished, and pointed, typically beginning with a commonplace observation and turning toward a surprising inference or moral test. Harris’s voice is urbane and conversational, enlivened by aphorisms and compact parables. He often imports brief quotations from poets, classicists, or scientists, not as decoration but as spur. Recurring features mingle with reflective essays; quick notebooks of curiosities sit beside meditations on death, success, and responsibility. The structure invites sampling while quietly building a composite ethic: attention, humility, and courage in ordinary life.

Illustrative Concerns
Several essays tackle schooling’s obsession with scores, contending that measurable achievement can eclipse meaningful learning. Others examine the workplace, arguing that competence without conscience corrodes trust. On public discourse, he laments how labels substitute for arguments and how we caricature opponents to avoid engaging them. He has a knack for reframing debates: freedom without self-discipline is license, tolerance without standards is indifference, and efficiency without purpose is wasteful in a deeper sense.

Harris’s humanism is capacious. He sees art as an education of feeling, science as an education of fact, and ethics as the education of will. He asks readers to integrate these strands rather than ranking them, suggesting that the good society depends on that integration in each person.

Tone and Perspective
Firm but not strident, Harris meets readers where they are. He is suspicious of utopias and gratified by small decencies. Even when the subject is grim, war, prejudice, the dulling effects of mass culture, his prose looks for leverage points, the places where a change in habit or language bends the larger arc. The emphasis is less on novelty than on renewal: recovering familiar virtues and applying them to new pressures.

Place in Harris’s Work
For the Time Being exemplifies Harris’s hallmark blend of clarity, wit, and moral seriousness. As a time capsule, it records anxieties about media, schooling, and social fracture that feel strikingly current. As a guide, it offers a method: slow down, define terms, examine motives, and act with decency. Its brevity conceals a steady argument that the quality of public life begins with the quality of private reflection.