In his article, "The Future of Tradition," author Lee Harris suggests that America's current culture war is the result of society's existing customs and traditions being called to the bar of reason and ruthlessly interrogated and cross-examined by an intellectual elite.

Harris is at his best in describing what happens when tradition is dishonored and abandoned. He points to the necessary function of moral tradition in the formation and defense of the family as the civilizational context for nurturing human beings who will defend, rather than destroy, the civilization they have inherited. As he explains, "The ethical, as opposed to the merely biological, family is the site for the making of civilized human beings out of id-governed monsters. It turns man's purely animalist collection of impulses and urges into a vehicle for passing on not merely accidental means, but deliberately engineered transformative customs across generations."

Harris understands that tradition is a "multi-generational project." Just as he asserts, civilization depends upon one generation's concern for its grandchildren. "Civilization persists when there is a widespread sense of an ethical obligation on the part of the present generation for the well-being of the third generation--their own grandchildren. A society where this feeling is not widespread may last as a civilization for some time--indeed, for one or two generations it might thrive spectacularly. But inevitably, a society acknowledging no transgenerational commitment to the future will decay and decline from within."

Beyond this, the family is the school for the most basic moral learning. In the family context, "no one is an ethical relativist," Harris observes. "A consistent ethical relativist would refuse to scold her child for doing anything whatsoever. Stab the poodle to death? To each his own. Toss your favorite CDs out the window? Who is to judge? Set the house on fire and gleefully watch it burn down? It all depends on your point of view." Helpfully, Harris explains that "Members of each generation are committed to making sure that the ethical baseline of their society does not move in a manner that their visceral code instantly tells them is wrong." Otherwise, the civilization moves towards its own destruction.

Harris understands another truth that he helpfully explains in terms of our current cultural conflict. "In the culture war of today, the representatives of one side have systematically set out to destroy the shining examples of middle America. They seem to be doing so with an unconscious fanaticism that most closely parallels the conscious fanaticism of the various iconoclastic movements in the history of Christianity. They are doing this in a variety of ways--through the media, of course, and through the educational system. They are very thorough in their work and no less bold in the astonishingly specious pretext upon which they demand the sacrifice of yet another shining example."