I found this interesting commentary on Conservatism:
"1.1 What is distinctive about conservatism as a political view?
Its emphasis on tradition as a source of wisdom that goes beyond what can be demonstrated or even explicitly stated.
1.2 Why is tradition a source of greater wisdom?
It is a network of commonly accepted attitudes, beliefs and practices that evolves through strengthening of things that work and rejection of things that lead to conflict and failure. It therefore comprises a collection of habits that have proved useful in a huge variety of practical affairs, and a comprehensive and generally coherent point of view that reflects very extensive experience and thought. Through it we know subtle and fundamental features of the world that would otherwise escape us, and our understanding of those things takes on concrete and usable form.
The usual alternative to reliance on tradition is reliance on theory. Taking theory literally can be costly because it achieves clarity by ignoring things that are difficult to articulate. Such things can be important; the reason politics and morals are learned mostly by experience and imitation is that most of what we need to know about them consists in habits, attitudes and implicit presumptions that we couldn't begin to put into words. There is no means other than tradition to accumulate, conserve and hand on such things.
Other considerations also support the wisdom of relying on tradition, if not specifically of tradition itself. For example, tradition typically exists as the common property of a community whose members are raised in it. Accordingly, it normally unites more than divides, and is far more likely than theory to facilitate free and cooperative life in common.
1.3 What's the difference between following tradition and refusing to think?
Conservatives do not reject thought but are skeptical of its autonomy. They believe that tradition guides and corrects thought, and so brings it closer to truth, which has no special connection with any private view.
Truth is not altogether out of reach, but our access to it is incomplete and often indirect. Since it can not be reduced wholly to our possession, conservatives are willing to accept it in whatever form it is available to us. In particular, they recognize the need to rely on the unarticulated truth implicit in inherited attitudes and practices.
Today this aspect of our connection to truth is underestimated, and conservatives hope to think better and know more truly by re-emphasizing it.
1.4 Why isn't it better to reason things out from the beginning?
Our knowledge of things like politics and morality is partial and attained slowly and with difficulty. We can't evaluate political ideas without accepting far more beliefs, presumptions and attitudes than we could possibly judge critically. The effects of political proposals are difficult to predict, and as the proposals become more ambitious their effects become incalculable. Accordingly, the most reasonable approach to politics is to take the existing system of society as a given that can't be changed wholesale and try to ensure that any changes cohere with the principles and practices that make the existing system work as well as it does.
1.5 Why can't tradition be an accumulation of ignorance, error and vice as easily as of wisdom?
Since tradition is a human thing it may reflect human vices as well as virtues. The same, of course, is true of relying on autonomous reason. In this century, anti-traditional theories supported by intelligent men for reasons thought noble have repeatedly led to the murder of millions of innocents.
The issue therefore is not whether tradition is perfect but its appropriate place in human life. To the extent our most consistent aim is toward what is good, and we err more through ignorance, oversight and conflicting impulse than coherent and settled evil, tradition will benefit us by linking our thoughts and actions to a steady and comprehensive system in which they can correct each other. It will secure and refine our acquisitions while hampering antisocial impulses. To the extent we consistently aim at what is evil, then tradition can not help us much, but neither can anything else short of divine intervention.
1.6 There are lots of conflicting traditions. How can anyone know his own is the right one?
Comprehensive certainty is hard to come by. Our own tradition (like our own reasoning) might lead us astray where another's would not. However, such concerns can not justify rejecting our own tradition unless we have a method transcending it for determining when that has happened, and in most situations we do not. If experience has led us astray it will most likely be further experience that sets us right. The same is true of tradition, which is social experience.
Putting issues of truth aside, the various parts of a particular tradition are adjusted to each other in a way that makes it difficult to abandon one part and substitute something from another tradition. A French cook will have trouble if he has to rely on Chinese ingredients and utensils. Issues of coherence and practicality accordingly make it likely that we will do better developing the tradition to which we are accustomed than attempting to adopt large parts of a different one.
1.7 But what about truth?
Most conservatives are confident comprehensive objective truth exists, but not in the form of a set of propositions with a single meaning equally demonstrable to all. The world is too big for us to grasp as a whole in a clear systematic way. We apprehend truth largely through tradition and in a way that cannot be fully articulated. Even if some truths can be known with certainty through reason or revelation, their social acceptance and their interpretation and application depend on tradition."
