In Stephen Hawking, we have got an assurance that our evolutionary journey is indeed towards humanism. Unfortunately, we are yet to falsify the theory of “survival of the fittest”. It has been, as it were, survival of the fittest brutes be it in a jungle or in a primitive society as well as in feudalism or in police state capitalism. But fortunately for us, after the emergence of welfare states such a brute yardstick is getting replaced by a scientific and humane one.
A welfare state is to create a level playing field for all of its citizens by taking extra care of the downtrodden, the poor, children, women, senior citizens and differently abled persons who have been exploited by the society since ages. Indeed, there are many instances of so called “unfit” persons outshining their “fit” counterparts especially in those states where they get extra care from the state to do justice to their potentialities.
We are slowly realising that we are to do better than the animals not by fighting like them or with them but by redefining the word “fitness” in accordance with humanism and that is by trying to create an egalitarian and humane society. Our outlook has been improving every day from regressive macho fitness model where dhooshoom dhooshoom are the last words of justice and fairplay. We are improving our judgement on a person’s disability from a disabled person to a physically challenged person and now in a very positive manner as a differently abled person.
Stephen Hawking’s splendid achievements in spite of his almost total physical disability has been made possible by his mind power, state patronage and also by an engineering marvel wheelchair which was equipped with a wonderfully friendly computer programme called Equalizer. Stephen Hawking will always be remembered as a super scientist as well as an empirical evidence that our evolutionary journey is not only from brutality to humanism but also from falsehood to the truth.
