Book: Last Things First

Overview
Sydney J. Harris’s Last Things First (1961) gathers a selection of his short newspaper essays into a quietly insistent manifesto about priorities, personal, civic, and intellectual. Writing from his perch as a Chicago columnist, Harris asks why modern life keeps elevating second-order matters, efficiency, status, facts, speed, over first-order aims such as wisdom, character, understanding, and humane community. The title signals his governing concern: a culture that persistently reverses means and ends will lose both clarity and conscience unless it learns to reorder what truly comes first.

Context and Structure
Drawn from Harris’s daily column, the pieces are compact, colloquial meditations that often begin with an everyday encounter, a classroom exchange, a friend’s remark, a news item, and unfurl into a broader reflection. Most essays run a page or two, designed to be read in a sitting, yet many carry aphorisms that linger. The miscellany format lets Harris pivot from education to politics, from language to manners, without abandoning a steady moral throughline.

Central Themes
Education, for Harris, is the prime example of misplaced priorities. We accumulate information without cultivating perception; we measure outcomes while neglecting aims. He returns to the idea that the purpose of learning is to “turn mirrors into windows,” moving people beyond self-reflection toward engagement with realities outside the self. Relatedly, he worries that public discourse rewards quickness over thought, cleverness over clarity, and noise over nuance.

A second theme is moral courage in ordinary life. Harris contends that integrity is forged not in grand gestures but in countless small, private decisions, keeping promises, listening fairly, resisting fashionable cynicism. He distrusts ideological certainties and demands that ends never justify shabby means. The book urges patience with persons and impatience with cant.

Harris also dissects language as a moral instrument. Euphemisms conceal cruelty; slogans replace thinking. He recommends plain words that fit plain facts, because honest speech is a precondition of honest action. This links to another recurring anxiety: a prosperity that hollows out purpose. Comfort, he suggests, can tempt people to mistake busyness for meaning and consumption for fulfillment.

Style and Voice
Harris writes as a humane contrarian: calm, skeptical of abstractions, fond of paradox and pointed analogy. He uses anecdotes to disarm and aphorisms to crystallize, preferring questions that prick the conscience to prescriptions that close debate. The prose is accessible but edged; a gentle cadence often ends in a sentence that stings.

Representative Insights
Again and again, Harris shows how “last things” crowd out “first things”: success displaces character, technique displaces purpose, winning displaces fairness. He rebukes the habit of treating efficiency as virtue, reminding readers that direction precedes speed. He distinguishes knowledge from wisdom, information from insight, and tolerance from indifference, urging the reader to recover discriminations that modern haste erodes.

Reception and Legacy
Last Things First consolidated Harris’s standing as a columnist whose daily pieces aspired to the durability of essays. Its observations feel anchored to their moment, postwar affluence, Cold War anxieties, the rise of mass media, yet the priorities he defends remain current. As a companionable primer in ethical common sense, the collection continues to be cited for its clean-lined maxims and its steady insistence that a life, a classroom, and a polity stand or fall by the order in which they place their values.