http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/30/opinion/brooks-the-limits-of-empathy.html?ref=opinion

I am currently reading Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy by Susan James. She devotes 294 pages to exploring emotions and their influence on seventeenth century philosophers.  Enter David Brooks into my world via The New York Times in his latest essay titled The Limits of Empathy, in a brisk 812 words, deals with the vexing emotion of empathy.(Mr. Brooks has a penchant for quoting experts, in all fields of intellectual endeavor, that  add an intellectually concrete dimension to his propagandistic ramblings.)  Now, it is vexing to Mr. Brooks, even problematic, because Conservatism and its advocates find it an inconvenient stumbling block to their grand plan to model the world, the life world in Hus6serl’s term, on the Free Market.  Modern American Conservatism located in 2011 is fixated upon the notion of an unrestrained Capitalism, its demonstrable failure, our very real immediate concern, as the world still deals with the horrendous consequences of the Economic Collapse of 2008. But that very reality can only be ignored by Mr. Brooks as irrelevant, to the greater ideological endeavor, of remaking not just the economic and political world in the image of a stunted malfeasant Capitalism, but re-imagining, remaking ethics and morality into a mirror of that exalted Market. Please see his August 22, 2011 essay titled The Rugged Altruists for confirmation of my line of argument, or at the least, his argumentative consistency. Thinkers and writers all over the world have spent their lives cogitating, writing, arguing on the problematic of human emotions, it is not a matter of reforming the emotions, but of coming to some basic understanding, that is a lifetime in the making; certainly not in a hastily written essay, composed in the face of a newspaper deadline. Professor Derek Parfit has written his two volume study titled On What Matters, published by Oxford University press in May 2011, it is 1440 pages long and is a successor to his 1984 Reasons and Persons. Mr. Brooks is another fluent ideologue with a craving for political respectability, who courts the adulation of the cursory reader.

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