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Notes -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perennial_philosophy
Though I suppose Guénon and Huxley make a stronger claim about the nature of reality. I'm restricting myself to the practical considerations.
What you see as closing off I see as codification. More on this later.
This is the major problem of modernity, we have no way to know how load bearing Chesterton's fence is. The implications of destroying traditions that we, by construction, do not rationally understand, are unclear and can range from entirely inconsequential to catastrophic.
The promise of the Enlightenment was that rational inquiry would permit scientific government, and thus that we'd be able to lay society on top of reason itself, but Positivism has totally failed even in its mildest incarnations, so now all that is left is raw post-modern games of power.
The best way I've seen to attempt to answer this question comes from Durkheim and the opposition between anomie and fatalism.
Once again here, what you see as closing off, I see as codification. It is much easier to form communities in an understandable world where you can make assumptions about the results of your actions, and others can properly interpret them. Norms reduce the randomness of intersubjective communication.
Let us consider tatoos again. In my grandmother's time, there was a strong taboo against them; though not illegal you would never get hired for a proper job if you had them, because they were the mark of sailors, criminals and other rough fellows.
It's easy to consider this a 100% bad arrangement from the standpoint of bourgeois morality. After all those people are stigmatized in such a way that they cannot join us in bourgeois life.
But consider the advantages of doing this to yourself if you are about that rebel life: you instantly share camaraderie with someone who also bears the mark, people know not to mess with you, the ladies know you're a badass and you can have a codified relationship with the cops where they won't let you into rich neighborhoods but they know not to tread in areas where you and people like you hang out. The fact it's painful even works as a sort of initiatic ritual.
In the liberalized world where this is a mere avenue of fashion, nobody can tell anything about you from this, and nobody knows where they stand.
Total unconstrained bodily autonomy, or indeed total licence, comes at the price of the destruction of a lot of unquantifiable but nevertheless useful social commons.
Liberalism has a tendency, by the necessity of its moral agnosticism, to break away thick concepts into thin. The former are the staple of traditional institutions, whose phenomenal goal is to compress as much meaning as possible into anodyne symbolism. Hence, such institutions are destroyed by the Liberal tendency.
I'll admit I'm too lazy to burrow in the archives of the last threads for it, but the topic keeps coming up so if you lurk enough you may just catch yet another one.
The basic argument I'm referring to here is that by which the Civil Rights Act and legislation like it has made sex segregated spaces practically impossible and with them much of male socialization, and with a rise in the sort of anomic suicide I was talking about earlier. Women were spared this for a while, but are in the process of this destruction now, which has made Feminists and proponents of traditional gender norms the strange bedfellows we see.
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