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Reclaiming Virtue: How We Can Develop the Moral Intelligence to Do the Right Thing at the Right Time for the Right Reason

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Reclaiming Virtue will go down in history as the most important book of the 21st century. John Bradshaw begins with 10 captivating moral moments that crystallize moral intelligence in a compelling way. He writes this book for all of us who are discouraged by the frightening absence of integrity in our social institutions and lack of humility in our leadership.

John helps us realize how dynamic we all become when claiming our internal authority for making right decisions. He validates ancient wisdom that we are vessels with an inborn moral compass- that we can call on our innate voice of conscience in these most troubling times.

John's book gives an eye widening account that our natural emotional intelligence has been scuttled by cultural rules of obedience. When our feelings have been shamed through perfectionism we can't know what moves us to make good decisions. His assertion that moral decisions are made from "affective inclination" is a ground shaking challenge to our assumption that logic, and intellectual rules constitute the foundation of moral action. He bravely goes against the grain of totalistic systems created "for our own good" that fail to account for the diversity and uniqueness that must be accepted in all of us for the human race to prevail.

John inspires us to connect through the "guardian angel" within us. He shows how to help our children develop moral intelligence by using non-shaming, strength based communication styles for building skills in emotional competence. He shares wisdom from his own most vulnerable moments that we can't make sense of our lives without awareness of our feelings. In revealing his personal suffering and journey towards virtue John Bradshaw's book stands apart. By starting with emotion Reclaiming Virtue constitutes a radical change in moral education.

Kip Flock

As always John Bradshaw keeps it real by sharing about his own struggles in life and offers great insights. Reclaiming Virtue is an important reading on developing moral intelligence.I enjoyed reading it.

John Bradshaw illuminates a subject that is lost in our contemporary world of complicity and personal aggrandizement - virtue.

A magnificent work - scholarly, deeply personal and intriguing. The author pulls from many fields, in addition to his own personal experiences both as a therapist and a man in recovery, to reveal the compelling necessity of personal virtue.

A fine book, well worth reading.

John Bradshaw's RECLAIMING VIRTUE: HOW WE CAN DEVELOP THE MORAL INTELLIGENCE TO DO THE RIGHT THING AT THE RIGHT TIME FOR THE RIGHT REASON is the most important meditation on certain key points in Aristotle's thought since Bernard Lonergan's INSIGHT: A STUDY OF HUMAN UNDERSTANDING (1957) and Eugene Garver's ARISTOTLE'S RHETORIC: AN ART OF CHARACTER (1994).

Bradshaw's 500-page magnum opus is his grand synthesis of what he has learned during his life from his own personal and professional experiences and from his reading. Bradshaw has mastered the reading material about which he writes.

RECLAIMING VIRTUE is reader friendly, including an ample index. From cover to cover, the sentences and paragraphs in the fifteen chapters of this ambitious book are clearly written and accessible. Each chapter is divided into bite-sized subsections introduced by suitable subheadings. However, even people who are familiar with Bradshaw's thought may find this 500-page text daunting to read because of the sheer number of topics covered in the various subsections. Slow reading may be the best approach to reading this book.

As the subtitle intimates, Aristotle's NICOMACHEAN ETHICS is one of the anchors and cornerstones of Bradshaw's book. For example, he quotes Aristotle on page 51: "Anybody can become angry - that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way - that is not within everybody's power and is not easy."

Mutatis mutandi, anybody can be helpful - that is easy, but to be helpful with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way - that is not within everybody's power and is not easy.

Do you get the idea? In short, deliberate virtuous acts represent the excellence of human flourishing, because virtue represents the excellence of human nature.

Regarding anger, Bradshaw himself makes his own contribution to our understanding of anger when he says that "anger must be tempered by healthy shame" (page 180). Unfortunately, many of us do not have a healthy sense of shame. Instead, we have an unhealthy sense of shame, which Bradshaw refers to as toxic shame.

Toxic shames skews not only our expression of anger but also our expression of other emotions as well. Bradshaw's central claim is that toxic shame binds our emotions. In plain English, our emotions are frozen in the past. As a result, "we overreact or react in other inappropriate ways" not only with respect to anger but also with respect to other emotions as well (page 249). Thus we do not do the right thing at the right time for the right reason.

To be able to do the right thing at the right time for the right reason habitually, we must overcome the various problems associated with toxic shame. But how can we proceed to do this? According to Bradshaw, the key to overcoming our toxic shame is grief work, which produces intrapsychic restructuring of our psyches. Even though he does not happen to mention the work of George H. Pollock, M.D., Ph.D., regarding grief work, the very title of the two-volume collection of Pollock's essays about grief work, THE MOURNING-LIBERATION PROCESS (1989), supports the claim that healthy grief work does produce intrapsychic restructuring of the psyche.

In any event, Bradshaw quotes Erik H. Erikson as saying that ego integrity in the mature older adult means "a new, different love of one's own parents, free of the wish that they should have been different, and an acceptance of the fact that one's life is one's own responsibility" (quoted on pages 315-16). For most of us, this kind of ego integrity would indeed require a significant intrapsychic restructuring in our psyches.

I admire Bradshaw for his work as a professional therapist in helping people to undertake the grief work that they need to work through in order to free themselves of the shame that binds their emotions. I also admire him for publicizing our need for grief work in order to recover from our toxic shame through his lectures, PBS television shows, and books. I have learned a lot from his books HEALING THE SHAME THAT BINDS YOU and RECLAIMING VIRTUE.

However, as the example of Alice Miller's own grief work shows, doing this kind of grief work can be a complicated undertaking, to say the least.

In this comprehensive work, John Bradshaw's life experience and soul shines through. He is writing this book for future generations and it is his legacy in advancing the causes of humanism and philosophy. He focuses on what it means to have moral wisdom or prudence in one's life and how we can promote it in our children. Virtue is a gift which we can develop through our repeated actions as per Bradshaw. Finding our true nature and fulfilling its mission is the recipe for a happy life. The book examines many philosophical and psychological concepts such as free will, meaning of suffering, life stages and human development, shame and others. Most of all it emphasizes that to be virtuous we need to practice in being virtuous. This is similar to building muscle by exercising on a consistent basis. Mr. Bradshaw is a truly inspirational individual with great life time achievements. He has, through his teachings and through helping others, greatly contributed to the betterment of our world. This book is a crowning achievement to his already multiple accomplishments.

The depth and commitment of this writters exploration of the human condition is humbling, in this particular work as well as other topics he has explored and argued in the past. John Bradshaw, good to hear from you again, and again,

He has written much better books than this one. The useful content in this book could fill a single 8 1/2 x 11 page.

I read a great deal and was really looking forward to receiving this book after seeing John Bradshaw on TV discussing. (I've been so discouraged with the lack of ethics in 'most' of Washington!) But this book is so far over my head....I am returning.