I think we’d all – religious believers and atheist humanists alike – agree: what’s really important in human life is the Metanoia. Not just any old metanoia, but a very specific metanoia, one each of us individually needs to undergo, and humanity collectively needs to undergo, in order to achieve any notion of what it might mean to lead “the good life” for each of us individually and for all of us collectively. It’s the veritable Holy Grail of human life, in fact: The Metanoia, with a capital “M”! Everything else we might like the idea of – meaning, freedom, happiness, wellbeing, security, peace, equality, justice, prosperity, you name it – just can’t happen without it.
The word itself comes from the classical Greek, with the prefix meta– added to gnosis, referring to a complete change or transformation in your awareness and understanding, a new mindset different to your old one not just in degree but in kind. The more recent import of “metanoia” into English, however, originates largely from its use in early Greek texts of the New Testament, where it is commonly translated as “repentance” or “conversion”, and it is now widely used across disciplines, including psychology, theology, and literary studies, referring to a deep, fundamental shift in one’s attitude or perspective, typically triggered by some sort of breakdown, crisis or significant life event.
Generally, metanoia sounds like a pretty good thing: there’s a sense in its current usage of a positive transformation, somehow getting closer to the truth about something important in your life, even psychological or spiritual healing. But what about the capital “M” metanoia specifically, the one I am claiming is the Holy Grail of human life? Well, I’m taking my cue from the word’s usage in the New Testament, often straight out of the mouth of Jesus himself, so here it is:
The Metanoia: the gradual transformation, over time, in an individual person, from a natural-born state of self-centredness to one of selflessness.
This particular metanoia invariably starts with a breakdown that is of the order of repentance – you come to an experience, a realization, an acknowledgement, often very painful, of your own futile, self-destructive selfishness – then proceeds to a re-building phase in which you begin to establish a new attitude, perspective, approach to life based on selflessly cooperating with and serving others.
From natural-born self-centredness, to selflessness: sounds simple, but how it actually comes about in the average human individual, and then in humanity collectively, is a tantalizing question, one we’ll address shortly. But do you agree that it is an important thing for, hopefully, every person to undergo? Just imagine if every single person on the planet underwent this metanoia successfully, maturing into an adult citizen of the world unbound by selfish ambition, setting out, each one, to make a positive contribution to the lives of others and the world around, exhibiting all the very best human qualities and virtues, such as friendliness, kindness, compassion, empathy, humility, intelligence, wisdom, determination, courage, selflessness…. Yes, human agency unbound from self-defeating and self-destructive selfishness, set free, unleashed to build a better life and world for all – tell me I’m dreaming!
It’s a utopian, pie-in-the-sky, Pollyanna vision, I’m sure you’re thinking – who is this crazy guy?! But what’s the alternative? Is it not self-evident that human selfishness, along with the pathological cultural forms of evil it creates and sustains, is the root cause of all human ills, on both an individual and a collective level? The root cause of fear, anxiety, depression, insecurity, poverty, inequality, injustice, slavery, violence, abuse of power, racism, conflict, war, environmental degradation – feel free to add your own examples. Yes, the human capacity for self-destruction is unprecedented and unparalleled – just last century we had three red-hot go’s at extinguishing ourselves altogether, World Wars 1 and 2, then the Cold War. And right now, at the end of the first quarter of the 21st century, we’re facing an amazing list of existential challenges all conspiring together, headed up by the great grandaddy of them all, global warming, now seen as an even bigger threat than nuclear conflict.
Help! Yes, the alternative is despair – head for the hills, head for the nuclear bunker, here comes the zombie apocalypse! – all our dystopian nightmares coming home to roost at once! So, give me Pollyanna any day. It’s a practical question, at any rate: how can humanity undergo the Metanoia, what will it take, how can we pull it off? – before it’s too late!
Well, it’s clear that most people, now, actually do undergo the Metanoia, to a greater or lesser extent. Yes, most of us are capable of some degree of selfless behaviour towards others; of being kind, empathetic, generous, altruistic sometimes; of not, at any rate, being complete narcissists or sociopaths all the time. It’s clear also that over the long timespan of human evolution our species has, slowly but surely, developed forms of community and society that are based on selfless cooperation rather than just power and dominance – the modern democracies of the world, for example, despite all their obvious uncertainties and shortcomings, in contrast to the absolute monarchies and autocracies of old. Clearly, therefore, it can happen; so, exactly how did it happen, how does it happen? – both the individual and the collective transformation?
The first possibility we can cross off the list is evolution itself – the idea that we have just gradually, naturally, evolved the capacity for intentional selfless cooperation. If you search for “the evolution of altruism” on the internet, there is a mountain of literature on the topic you can access – I commend it to you. There you will readily find many interesting and well-developed theories about how we humans developed the capacity in question, in the course of our now approximately 300,000-year evolution. The assumption is that human cooperation is essentially an enhanced, expanded version of non-human animal cooperation, made possible, presumably, by our greater intelligence and communication skills. However, while non-animal animal cooperation is the obvious evolutionary precursor of the human capacity for cooperation, and you could plausibly, as these theories typically do, imagine a hypothetical continuous progression from one to the other, the spanner in the works for all such theories is that human cooperation, being conscious and intentional, is different in kind to non-human animal cooperation, which is, primarily, non-conscious, instinctive, biological. No amount of expansion or intensification can turn an apple into an orange – can turn instinctive, non-conscious cooperation into the sort of conscious, selfless cooperation humans need to survive and thrive.
Here’s a great example: the pathological cultural phenomenon we know as nationalism. On one hand, a citizenry whipped up into a nationalist fervour by an autocratic hero-leader can achieve what seem to be great feats of cooperative endeavour – witness Nazi Germany in the 1930s, for example. But individuals in such a polity are not motivated by selfless service for the common good, rather by emotional identification with the hero-leader and the nation, so that the fervent love and adoration of leader and nation experienced is essentially an instinctive, natural self-love, rather than a form of intentional selfless love or altruism. This sort of love has more in common, in fact, with hatred, as you can clearly see in what typically happens next: violent persecution of minorities and dissidents, and aggressive wars of conquest waged on surrounding nations, which inevitably lead the people and the nation down a path of self-destruction. The point is that no amount of expansion or intensification of natural, instinctive self-love, to encompass even a whole nation, can lead to genuine selfless love – indeed it is only when such instinctive forms of love break down, in the crises of individual and collective life, that the capacity for selflessness and selfless cooperation has a chance to start emerging.
Here’s another example, closer to home: the controlling helicopter parent whose intense, obsessive love of their child quickly turns to hatred and even abuse when the child inevitably fails to measure up to their expectations. Again, an instinctive, egocentric self-love is projected onto the child, who then becomes the unfortunate proxy for the selfish hopes and dreams of the parent. A limited amount of such love is, of course, a natural starting point for all parenting, but it is critical for successful parenting that parents quickly find their way beyond this to a love for their child which is truly selfless, otherwise their relationship will become toxic, pathological.
It’s not, therefore, we should note, that human cooperation doesn’t contain some purely instinctive, biological elements garnered from our non-human animal past, or, for that matter, that non-human animal cooperation doesn’t contain elements of conscious intentional cooperation – the two types of cooperation are mixed together to some extent in both non-human animals and humans. What is the case, however, is that non-human animals never really get beyond purely instinctive cooperation, which is perfect within itself but necessarily limited in scope; whereas human animals have somehow found a way of developing non-instinctive, intentional cooperation, which is essentially unlimited in scope, even if it is much more problematic and imperfect.
Imagined, hypothetical progressions, from non-animal animal cooperation to intentional human cooperation, no matter how seemingly plausible, remain just that – hypothetical – at any rate; we just can’t turn back the clock and directly observe how it actually happened. Of course, if there is nothing else going on in human evolution other than the material processes Darwin’s wonderful theory describes, then one version or other of hypothetical progression must necessarily be true, regardless of the fact that there isn’t, and can never be, any direct evidence for any such theory. Except that, as it turns out – surprise, surprise – there actually is plenty of direct evidence, which we can readily observe any day of the week, of the progression in question – the Metanoia – occurring. Where do we – every day of the week – see the Metanoia unfolding before our very eyes? In little human children growing up from infancy to adulthood – obviously!
Metanoia live, 24/7 (virtually)! The critical thing you notice as you watch the daily spectacle is that little humans do not develop the capacity for selfless cooperation spontaneously, off their own bat, rather only through the outside intervention of their parents, and other interested parties like extended family members and teachers. Selfless cooperation in all its forms – playing nicely, sharing, being kind and generous, showing good manners and being polite, caring for and helping others – is, in fact, a learned behaviour, not a natural-born, instinctive one. The only natural-born, instinctive human behaviour is the opposite – self-centredness – the very form of behaviour all of us humans most urgently need to get beyond – as I’ve been saying!
Yes, it’s a learned behaviour – selfless cooperation – so it necessarily needs outside intervention to make it happen; specifically, it needs someone (or two or three) to act as a teacher. Necessarily! So, let me recapitulate. What we are contemplating here is the only non-hypothetical, primary, direct evidence of how the Metanoia occurs in humans, and there is an awful lot of it (such evidence)! Only through outside intervention, intentional teaching, is the Metanoia ever observed to occur. There is precisely zero direct, non-hypothetical evidence of it occurring naturally, not even in one, single human being. I rest my case!
Little humans are as resistant to the Metanoia as the human race in general, of course, born as all of us are with the fundamental trait of life that Darwin’s theory describes, the non-conscious will to survive and survive at all costs, to cling onto our own self-interest and never let it go, not even for an instant. Yet let it go we must, to undergo the Metanoia, to give ourselves half a chance at “the good life”, to give our whole species half a chance of surviving long enough to form good and just forms of community and society. The letting go is the breakdown phase of the Metanoia, which you can also neatly observe any day of the week, in little humans, especially between ages 2 and 4, with their sudden propensity for amazing tantrums, as they face for the first time the shocking reality that the world doesn’t always cooperate with their schemes. It’s always painful for us, at any age, to let go of our self-interest, it’s like a mini-death each time. Typically, we don’t willingly give it up, rather it has to be ripped out of our hands, by someone else, or by circumstances that occur – even this phase of the Metanoia seems to require outside intervention!
To move beyond the breakdown/letting go phase requires intervention too. Parents restrain, console, distract their little darlings, attempting to turn it into a learning experience which they can draw on next time. Without intervention the natural resort for us when things don’t go our way is to sulk, despair, harbour resentment, give up; or argue, fight back, digging ourselves into an even bigger hole – or, worse still, succeeding in our retaliation, which only serves to reinforce our self-centredness. A parent, a friend, a teacher, even a disinterested bystander or the law, will hopefully intervene, however, to save us from ourselves. Or better still our own memory will intervene, a sudden recollection of a past intervention, a past learning experience – ah, yes, I’ve been here before, I think I know what to do this time …. And so the Metanoia gathers pace in our lives, always and only, necessarily, through the intervention of an outside agency who plays the role, in some way, of selfless cooperation teacher.
Yes, only outside intervention can save us from ourselves; but are we then just passive receptacles at this point and beyond, with our own agency playing no role at all? Definitely not: the Metanoia, at its heart, is a fundamental reorientation of our agency, indeed an unbinding or liberation of it – as we’ve already anticipated. In our natural-born state of self-absorption our agency is well and truly alive, but it is certainly not well, rather it is oriented inwards, concerned solely with self, not yet objectively aware of itself or other selves around, enclosed or imprisoned, therefore, within itself, as in a closed circle – incurvatus in se was Luther’s Latin expression, “curved in on oneself”. Then the breakdown comes, the circle is broken, and, yes, in that moment, our agency, so to speak, collapses, dies. Next the intervention, but even when it comes, we still have a choice, as described in the last paragraph, we can go forwards out of the closed circle or back deeper inside it. On what basis might we choose one or the other? The backwards option is the easy, normal, natural one: we naturally trust, believe, have faith in ourselves, so we fall back on our original plan – we’ll either win or take the whole world down with us! The forwards option, by contrast, requires trust, faith, belief, not in ourselves, but in the intervening outside agency, the selflessness teacher who has come to our rescue. Courage mon ami – yes, it requires real guts to go against our nature and choose to follow the advice of someone who is telling us to let go of our selfish scheming and open ourselves up to the concerns and needs of others for a change.
Selflessness teachers who come to our rescue: it’s clear who they are in the case of each of us individually – our parents, principally, in most of our cases. And our parents, in their case, were rescued, taught by ….. their parents, presumably – and so on, down the generations. So, how did it all begin? Who or what is the selflessness teacher for humanity as a whole? One obvious possibility we need to consider, even though it flies in the face of everything we’ve been saying so far, is that early humans acquired a nascent capability for genuinely selfless cooperation courtesy of a random genetic mutation, which then evolved over time through natural selection into a more substantial capability. A random genetic mutation acting in the capacity of a selflessness teacher – how wonderfully fortuitous!
The problem immediately, however, is that any capability for selflessness that was determined by a genetic mutation would necessarily be instinctive and biological rather than conscious and intentional, and therefore could only ever mimic real selflessness. And then, as soon as the lucky organism or organisms in question, the recipients of the fortuitous mutation, did just that – let go of their self-interest in favour of others – natural selection would immediately shoot them down in flames – de-select rather than select them.
The bottom line, therefore, is that selfless love teaching can only occur through a conscious agent who already has the capacity for selflessness – it can never be successfully mimicked by any sort of non-conscious, material process. I think I’m labouring the point here – but just so’s you know, humanity definitely could not have acquired the capacity for selflessness as the result of a random genetic mutation.
Nor indeed, for that matter, did we have a nice pair of original primordial parents – Adam and Eve or equivalent – who were created with the capacity in question and who then started the ball rolling down the generations, because we are evolved creatures and such parents never actually existed. So, a conscious agent, outside of all humanity, who intervenes, to start the ball rolling and keep it rolling? Sounds suspiciously like a job description fit for a God who is that way inclined – to teach humanity a thing or two about selfless love – and, as it turns out, it is!
At this stage I want to refer you to my recent book, The God Who Doesn’t Exist*, where this whole matter is fleshed out in detail. But even a quick glance down the long history of religion will elicit the fact that this particular human cultural activity has always been primarily concerned with Metanoia, with teaching young humans the skills of cooperative living in community and society. And whether we think the gods and, more recently, God, were actually real, or were always and only ever fabricated by us, unintentionally, perhaps, and were therefore never anything more than unconsciously formed projections of our own human egos, it was certainly these multifarious gods, and then God, whom religion always looked to, first and foremost, for inspiration and guidance with the Metanoia, or indeed to actually broker it in us.
Supernatural gods, and a one-God, existing outside of and independently of us, whose primary role is to teach us how to cooperate selflessly in communities and societies, to broker the Metanoia? Yes, religion has often got it seriously wrong, too often allying itself with despotic, autocratic power in the interests of social stability and control, and the gods they either discovered or invented were often or even usually self-seeking, venal, judgmental, vengeful or just plain useless. But broker the Metanoia in human life they seem to have, more or less successfully, done, and that can only be accounted for, as I have outlined in this essay, by the real existence of an external selfless love teacher, AKA, I’m afraid to say, God. So, somewhere amongst the many gods and God of historical religion, many or even most of whom almost certainly never existed, there must be at least one real God who does. Happy days!
The critical take away, however, is this: we humans are powerless to undergo the Metanoia off our own bat; only through trust and faith in a selfless love teacher outside of us do we have half a chance. For little children this is certainly, initially, trust and faith in their parents, who essentially act, as I describe in my book, in loco dei, in the place of God. But by adulthood this must have gradually morphed into trust and faith in a selfless love-teaching God outside of them and outside all humanity – if only because our parents are never perfect and even sometimes betray our trust. So, no courageous, well-intentioned humanism will never do – when the going gets tough, in those critical moments of life when our self-centred schemes fail once again, only such faith and trust can empower us to escape the vicious, closed circle of self to the greater life of selflessness beyond. So for each of us individually, so for humanity as a whole. Vive le Metanoia!
* Further reading: Fergus McGinley, The God Who Doesn’t Exist (2025), ATF Press, Adelaide.