Recently, I was discussing with a friend of mine the – in my estimation – quantum leap currently happening in women’s tennis (analogous to the evolution of men's tennis with players like Alcaraz and Sinner) and expressing my admiration for Aryna Sabalenka’s performance at Wimbledon. His immediate response was, and I quote:
“She needs to work on her sportsmanship. Trash talk Gauff after losing in the French final.”
He is British, of course – which is important here. He was referring to some not-so-wise words Sabalenka uttered after losing the match, during the press conference. Of course, the internet was on fire afterward, as Sabalenka basically said Gauff wouldn’t have won if she herself had just played better.
Which was true, obviously! But the internet didn’t care. Perfect sportsmanship wasn’t achieved, so her statement was dismissed, and her character was questioned.
What struck me most about his comments was the apparent policing of words that everyone seems to be engaging in. May I remind you that this is a fairly recent development? We all had a good laugh in the 1990s when footballers would talk utter nonsense right after the game, still sweating with a microphone shoved in their face. Somewhere in recent years, we’ve decided that athletes must produce perfect comments immediately after the game, maintain perfect composure after a loss, and behave in the most eloquent way—a feat that is quite challenging for most of us in public settings as well.
I’m not here to judge that. Maybe there’s some wisdom in this kind of policing. It’s obviously the super-ego taking charge, judging the id of athletes who don’t always control themselves perfectly. We still seem to live in a very Protestant/Puritan age, despite the “meta-crisis.”
But it got me thinking. Sociologist Hans Möller, in his incredible Carefree Wandering podcast, talks about the ‘general peer’ we have to relate to now – an imaginary peer that, in a way, is the sum of the moral views held by society. We can’t live without this culturally embedded intersubjective peer. Instead of family and friends, we now relate to this peer to shape our own opinions. They are still our opinions, but we can’t stray too far from them. From this perspective, my friend, who is British, refers to a different general peer than I do, since I am German. But we are close enough to respect one anothers general peers, and different enough to have very fruitful conversations.
This leads me to the next point: there hasn’t been a truly global general peer yet as something we all collectively agree upon. And because it hasn´t emerged yet, there is a lot of policing going around, propably in the intent and hope to create such a global general peer (that would be then the inbuild wisdom of the policing - but I am just speculating). There is this inherent drive to coalesce within our society, or in the eternal words of Mr. Ken, of Agape, that drive that pushes an economically multinational and pluralistic society towards a yet to been seen global general peer.
For example, there’s a lot of policing happening in these circles that claim to be philosophical and post-postmodern—be it integral, metamodern, or otherwise, about certain contentious topics. Case in point: Israel. But we also have to consider that the people involved in these kinds of online-discussions relate to different general peers—English, Australian, French, Swedish, American, German, Turkish, Russian, and so forth, all left center and right - while it might seem on the surface that they share the same general peer because they engage in the same online forums.
I am German. I relate foremost to my German general peer, which is part of my ethnocentric thinking. For better or worse, nobody can fully escape their ethnocentric worldview, we can´t just shed this. We are all naturally biased by our cultural backgrounds. Because of my German history, my general peer urges me to take an uncompromising pro-Israel stance. I understand other perspectives—American, British, etc., left and right,—conceptually, but I am unfazed. There is no debate in my mind—Israel has the right to be a state, to defend itself, and to do everything necessary to extinguish Hamas, who started this conflict on October 7th with a horrifying attack killing many many young people. Yes, Israel has the right to wage war.
Israel is a very small country—less than a tenth the size of Germany—surrounded by a sea of Islamic countries with no other goal than to destroy it. — Till the 90ties is was perfectly save to say from mainstream journalists like the great Peter Scholl Latour that Islam is a warmongering religion, that it is sort of memetically embedded into its genesis and history. Now we have to be careful around statements like this — I certainly would not say so (I respect the general peer)!
But more importantly, Israel has had the secular enlightenment—a societal institution and cultural immune-system against religious fervor and violence, against female oppression and torture. Israel is a tiny island amid medieval cultures that have carried out over 45,000 terrorist attacks since 2001, killing tens of thousands of people. To my mind there is no difference between Spanish Catholics killing hundreds of women in Sevilla in 1539 because of witchcraft and Iraq sentencing the same amount of women to death in 2025 for similar reasons. (Remember, cultural evolution takes time, and Islam is 500 years younger than Christianity, so they hopefully have their Enlightenment still in front of them.) The Enlightenment, that fragile and improbable cultural achievement, is certainly worth protecting.
That’s what my German general peer tells me. I am aware of it. I can’t easily change my cultural peer, though I can soften it by acknowledging other general peers, but probably not in the way you think I do:
Yes, killing civilians, man and woman and child alike, is horrifying. It’s what the Americans and Russians did in 1944/1945 in Dresden and whole areas of Germany (which before that completley re-definined what genocide means), or what the Americans did in Hiroshima and Vietnam and Iraq, or what the Barbarians, Vikings, Romans, Mongols, Muslims, English and Spanish did since times immamorial. It’s the ugly face of war. The Hamas terrorists know this of course and strategically places their military installations beneath civilian housing. In the red thick of it, nobody cares for the Geneva convention.
Especially as a “evolutionary thinker”, nobody can close their eyes to the existential nature of war, its periodicity, its necessity, and its being part of human nature—just as much as we all strive for a better future. Everybody in our liminal circles loves to refer to the ‘evolutionary narrative’ with some “Hurray”, but most of those proponents of evolution don’t realize that evolution is usually a very nasty and brutal process. It means destroyed cities so new infrastructure can be built entirely around new technologies (that were invented because of war, for instance the Manhatten/nuclear project during WW2). It means—through means such as rape—distributing and enriching the gene pool of a people. It means artificially reconstructing the feeling and the zeitgeist of a culture through violence. It involves artificial bloodletting so that new trends in art and philosophy can emerge. That’s the even darker side of war, the function of war for the human species. We need it. Sorry, but not sorry. Open your eyes and read a history book. It’s all in there: Human history is a history of warfare. We are ugly evolutionary predators, independently what prostestant pastors of every colouer will tell you.
I will not try to persuade you, though, of my German general peer’s views—it forbids it. That’s something for the philosophical police to do.
But I will say, in order to strive for a truly global general peer—a post-postmodern goal—we have to allow all these views and expressions of nationalist/ethnocentric general peers. Only through discourse can we create consensus. Just screaming that every pro-Israel position is fascist and Zionist doesn’t help the liminal/ integral/metamodern or just the philosophical discourse.
If you want to read more and more saner thoughts of mine, check out my recent book, “Phenomenology of will” - T
The general peer is such a helpful concept, this is my first introduction to it.
It makes me laugh because it really is a thing, I am British and my husband is American (angelino) Jewish. And I find him very ‘rude’, my British general peer flinches. But clearly I must like it.
Then there are all the different classes of general peers in England itself, with different accents and customs too. There’s so much cringing when the different peers come together.