Transnormalism

Society is unlikely to fall suddenly under the spell of the transhumanist worldview. But it is very possible that we will nibble at biotechnology’s tempting offerings without realizing that they come at a frightful moral cost… Modifying any one of our key characteristics inevitably entails modifying a complex, interlinked package of traits, and we will never be able to anticipate the ultimate outcome… we may unwittingly invite the transhumanists to deface humanity with their genetic bulldozers and psychotropic shopping malls.

the great artisan… made man a creature of indeterminate nature, and… said to him ‘Adam, we give you no fixed place to live, no form forever peculiar to you, no function that is yours alone. According to your desires and judgment, you will have and possess whatever place to live, whatever form, and whatever functions you yourself choose… To you is granted the power of degrading yourself into the lower forms of life, the beasts, and to you is granted the power, contained in your intellect and judgment, to be reborn into the higher forms, the divine.’… To us it was given to be whatever we choose to be, and so that is what we want.

Around 2003 there was a big, rancorous human enhancement debate 3.

The reigning “bioconservatives” predicted that new biotech would lead to moral or political catastrophe, and the loss of human dignity, and maybe wouldn’t even boost welfare; the “transhumanists” 2 argued that nuh uh.

Some of the technologies they fought over (cloning, germline editing) haven’t happened at scale yet. But others (GLPs, hormones, hair tech, embryo selection) did, and were rapidly adopted by millions of people who had no interest in either ideology.

And so: a new era of mass chemical enhancement and healthy polypharmacy 1:

(link, link)

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(link - a huge decline but still 1% of US pop! And trans is up to another 1%)

As so often, Fukuyama (quoted above) looks wrong but is not wrong: society indeed did not become transhumanist - that is, not in belief. Few of the biotech users endorse the philosophy of technological transcendence. But society is heading there in deed. Conservative forces (religion, disgust, precaution) were in this case grossly outgunned by the force of sheer desire.

We got, not transhumanism (as deliberate, informed, rational decision to self-consciously go beyond natural human capacity), but surreptitious transhuman behaviour, without the weird philosophy or the new aesthetics. Technology by default, without conscious ideology. Playing god - but using these new, unfathomable powers to… become more normal. So call it transnormalism. 5.

What of the bioconservative prediction of a reckoning for civilisation? So far none arrived. Either

1. the current techs are not powerful enough yet; or
2. the corrosive effects (on say fairness, authenticity, self-concept) are lagged or hard to measure; or
3. mass enhancement is just fine.

Ancient enhancement

A weak reason to think it’s fine is that we’ve been doing it for all of history and prehistory. Enhancement is older than humanity. What’s new is just the size of the enhancements and the biological, internal, invisible nature of the modifications.

Classic:


New:

Normal exceptionalism: the escape from morphological freedom

With the exception of the bodybuilding and trans communities 6, we don’t see much weirding at mass scale. We aren’t expressing our morphological freedom to look more different. It seems to me that the result of power over our appearance is not deviance and weirdness but heightened normative normalcy. Bigger biceps, fewer wrinkles, and nerds suddenly getting normative gender presentation. Not many cyborgs.

I’m not fit to do any comparative analysis of the history of cosmesis and beauty standards. This essay is great. But it seems to me that the beauty queens and movie stars of the 1960s no longer look as exceptional as they once did, because cosmetic technology (and image editing ig) has shifted the (top decile of the) distribution upwards so much. I can’t say what all of this is tending towards. What is the intensified platonic ideal of a normal dude?

It’s pretty obvious why tech which gives you options is used, on average, to normalise yourself: most people want to be normal, and the user population is so large now that it simply must include a lot of such people. In 2010 enhancement was a matter for nerds, hackers, and obsessive hobbyists like bodybuilders. But now it’s a much bigger coalition (e.g. 6-12% of Americans on GLP agonists).

Medicalisation and demedicalisation

You don’t need any new or unpopular premises at all to justify enhancement. Transnormalism is what you get from liberalism plus medicalisation. Consumer enhancement has been happening in the form of individual medical decision-making: distributed, highly private (with some actual infosec), and invisible except by us belatedly noticing the aggregate properties of the species changing.

Medicine has been expanding for centuries, especially in the last two decades. This is true in volume (spending) and in domains (new treatments, new powers, new areas brought within the ambit).

In absolute terms (multiplying healthcare share by GWP) we spent $1.85tn in 2000, something north of $7.1tn in 2022 (and more now).

But after being incubated in medicine, enhancement is being taken off the doctors. The thriving grey market (intense cosmetics, “aesthetics” and “med spas” and nootropics) and black market (study drugs, research chemicals, peptides, bootleg hormones) are of unknown size but growing insanely fast.

You are like a little baby

The above technologies are really fairly weak. Retatrutide (2023) is twice as strong as semaglutide (2014), which is twice as strong as liraglutide (2002). At some point someone will work out how to chemically simulate the effect of working out. The nootropics industry is overall a pathetic failure, capped with blunt instruments like not sleeping or flooding the brain with catecholamines. Psychopharmaceuticals are better but not by much and don’t manage sustainbly-better-than-well. We are admittedly really good at things which let people sprint for 6% longer, though at the expense of giving them cancer. We do nearly nothing directly to brains. We have basically nothing for memory enhancement. At the moment we do little with genes, but the rich and unsqueamish are beginning to. All humans are born premature. One might solve sleep. One might solve death.

The conservative concerns might apply to a more-mature science of More. Thanks to transnormalism funding it all we will soon see.

We find sheer humanism to be unsatisfying. It shuts the windows, draws the blinds, and seeks artificial elegance - oblivious of the outer night and the stars. Instead, we boldly go out into darkness and find the superhuman everywhere… the story of evolution of life: its length, its wastefulness, its precariousness, its chanciness, its progressive release of potentiality, its incomprehensibility and ourselves as moments within it… man is transitional and scarcely a beginning.

See also

• https://www.gleech.org/med
• https://vectorculture.substack.com/p/not-for-human-consumption
• https://bengoldhaber.substack.com/p/no-real-nattys
• https://christianangermayer.substack.com/p/the-future-is-enhanced
• https://web.archive.org/web/20250202101559/https://humanenhancementdrugs.com/
• https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-8519.2005.00437.x
• https://web.archive.org/web/20210202180452/https://thingsvarious.medium.com/hormone-replacement-therapy-the-only-guide-you-need-2904aa48b7bd
• http://bactra.org/Medawar/technology-and-evolution/
• https://www.gleech.org/med
• https://vectorculture.substack.com/p/not-for-human-consumption
• https://bengoldhaber.substack.com/p/no-real-nattys
• https://web.archive.org/web/20080613192720/http://www.bioethics.gov/reports/beyondtherapy/chapter1.html
• https://nickbostrom.com/papers/a-history-of-transhumanist-thought/
• https://global.oup.com/academic/product/natural-born-cyborgs-9780195177510
• https://branko2f7.substack.com/p/dr-morell-and-the-patient-a
• https://doctorzebra.com/prez/z_x35testosterone_g.htm