I mostly agree, that's all good and well... until it comes to moral choices, especially big ones. Here, even if people are very biased, don't know their own preferences, just plain don't care about others, etc... shallow conformism is still a worse option in many situations. If everyone just looked to their current group's authorities in deciding how or whether to do the right thing - and those authorities looked to the past - ... wouldn't we have, for example, 0% of Germans resisting the Holocaust instead of 2%? Wouldn't slavery be a respected institution to this day, lazily "justified" by things like genetic differences? Wouldn't, say, husbands be allowed by law and public opinion to beat, rape and essentially own their wives?

No, no, "conservative"/"traditionalist" ethics are a path to nowhere without a complex semi-conscious system, varying from individual to individual and acting on both rational and emotional levels, that would allow one to relate one's personality and preferences with their group's tradition and accumulated knowledge/heuristics, and which would be given priority during judgment-making by an appeal to a higher, ideal authority - in short, without an essentially religious worldview.[1]

Unfortunately, not everyone has it in them to be Oskar Schindler or Sophie Scholl, but many people only had to be "good Christians" when the moment of truth came - to follow the output of that deep and broad system, which had been known as "Christianity", "Western values", "common decency", but which ultimately drew upon similar sources, and had the ethical advice of centuries encapsuled within it. Alas, it was the 20th century, and things like that - old, complicated, below-the-surface systems - were just falling apart everywhere. But we shouldn't just sit back and allow our own system to follow this course.

This is why I'm against any "rational" tampering with today's mainstream Western worldview, even where I'm to the left or to the right of its political aspects. Any attack on "Liberal hypocrisy" that has indeed taken root in the last 50 years and largely replaced Christianity is short-sighted simply because this system is likely the only thing really holding our civilization together. If anything, perhaps we should move towards giving it more religious trappings - official commandments, saints, etc - without necessarily adding any supernatural element, but certainly without naively preaching that e.g. "Human Rights" don't make much sense.

Today, a thinking conservative should be focused on improving and stabilizing the prevailing liberal dogma, not trying to return to the failed Protestant/Catholic one or make a "dogma-free" system. In short, I'm for free individual search through the collected conscious and subconscious ideas of your culture - its narrative. And where you've got a narrative, you've got humans' natural ability to work with stories; abstract ideas are counter-intuitive, but picking out, combining and adapting stories is, IMO, how we can best handle social thinking.

(Sorry for such a rambling comment, I was just prompted to unload some under-construction ideas by seeing a post that's related to them. Paragraphs here can be read separately.)

[1] I'm not talking about any kind of "faith" here, a belief in the suprenatural and so forth, but about the style of thinking that organized religion or advanced ideology seems to foster in developed, all-around intelligent people - like Chesterton or Orwell. My argument is that the average human also benefits from such a system, and this would be more noticeable with better systems. (Compare the Socialism/Communism of the students and professors who were behind the dismantling of the Segregation in the U.S. - mostly good people, for all their flaws and possible delusions - with e.g. the primitive, simplified worldview of early Bolsheviks. Both are clearly religions, but one does its adherents more good than the other.)