“What we leave behind is not as important as how we've lived.”
- Jean-luc Picard
Heroes die, we know that. They are, after all, only human. It’s just that their passing tends to leave enormous, gaping holes in our collective consciousness, especially when we see who’s left standing: oftentimes the vile, the weak and the venal. Most of all we mourn our heroes because, in comparison to them, we are left with mediocrities, and deep down we fear we number among those.
Stephen Hawking, the great English cosmologist and black hole guru, liked to say he was born 300 years to the day after Galileo died, passed away on Wednesday, March 14th, 139 years after Albert Einstein was born and on the thirtieth anniversary of pi day.
If the measure of a man’s greatness in this hot-wired, instant-gratification, cyber-dominated world lies in the effusiveness of tributes and obituaries then Stephen Hawking’s place in history must indeed be vast: papers as varied as the 'New York Times' and Singapore’s 'Straits’ Times' devoted enormous writeups on their websites about him, and the sheer variety of emailed and Twitter tributes ran the gamut from heads of state to rock stars, fellow scientists and even the showrunner from ‘The Simpsons.’ That is as it should be, for he was a truly unique, even Protean figure, whose popularity transcended the rarefied, even arcane confines of his science (Cosmology) to embrace popular culture. His was the type of celebrity even Donald Trump would envy.
In the popular press, he was often referred to as the greatest physicist since Einstein. That, he always said, was nothing more than media hyperbole, driven by the public’s relentless desire for secular saints and thirst for heroes. But, all modesty aside, Hawking’s life was epic in scope and he was a hero, not just for what he taught us about the universe, but for what he taught us about how to live.
To the public, he was, in Homer Simpson’s words, “the wheelchair guy,” who despite being slowly paralyzed by Lou Gehrig’s disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), to the point where he could move only an eyeball, roamed the world and figuratively the universe, married twice, fathered three children, wrote best-sellers and nurtured generations of graduate students. He mingled with kings and presidents and the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders. He had hoped someday to take a trip to the edge of space on Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic spaceship (aptly named the ‘Enterprise’). He loved ‘The Simpsons,’ ‘The Big Bang Theory,’ ‘Star Trek,’ and ‘Rick and Morty.’ He also popularized science beyond the purview of geeks and nerds: he was cool and he made science cool.
To scientists, however, he will be forever known for finding a relation between gravity -- in the form of Einstein’s general theory of relativity -- that bends the cosmos and determines its destiny and the atomic randomness that lives inside it, swept helplessly along in the river of time. Like Einstein, and Galileo, he did his greatest work on gravity, a force we all feel in our bones, a force that, Einstein decreed, would even bend starlight, leaving, “lights all askew in the heavens.”
But more than any of that, Hawking possessed a unique self-awareness that extended far beyond his field. He became a more transcendent figure, discipline-agnostic, issuing opinions with an almost Olympian tinge, venturing into the realms of social pronouncements (preserving the NHS), colonizing other planets, and raging against the potential Pandora’s box of sentient artificial intelligence. He also had penchant for sharp socio-political commentary, and was, in his final years, deeply concerned with forces that shaped the kinds of decisions we make at the ballot box.
As a theoretical physicist based in that most rarefied of university centres, Cambridge, Stephen Hawking lived out his years in what can only be truthfully called a very privileged bubble. Cambridge, like its great rival, Oxford, is an anomalous town, centred as it is around one of the world’s greatest universities. Within that intellectual locus, the scientific community that he became part of in his 20s is even more cliquish.
And within that scientific community, the small group of international theoretical physicists with whom he spent his working life might have occasionally regarded themselves as the ne plus ultra. In addition to this, with the celebrity that came with his books, kicked off by the monumental bestseller ‘A Brief History of Time,’ and the isolation imposed by his ALS, he must have felt like a metaphorical Rapunzel trapped in an ivory tower growing ever taller and further from the madding crowd.
So, to Hawking the socio-political thinker the rejection of the elites in both America (presidential election 2016) and Britain (Brexit 2016; the British election 2017), was aimed at people exactly like himself, as much as anyone. Whatever one might think about the decision by the British electorate to reject membership of the European Union and by the American public to (however reluctantly) embrace Donald Trump as their 45th president, there is no doubt in the minds of observers and analysts worldwide that this was a collective expression of anger and sheer fed-up effrontery by people who felt they had somehow been either neglected or forgotten by their leaders. They were the contemporary equivalent of Richard Nixon’s “Great Silent Majority” sick of being told they were bad people, and shoved to one side in an orgiastic celebration of the hitherto marginal elements of society.
It was the moment when the forgotten spoke, finding their voices to reject the advice and guidance of experts and the elite everywhere.
What matters now, people like Hawking believed, far more so than the victories of Brexit and Trump, which could be explained away as ephemeral historical anomalies as the political pendulum shows signs of swinging back the other way, is how the elites continue to react. Should they, in turn, reject these votes as outpourings of crude populism that fail to account for facts, and attempt to circumvent or circumscribe the choices that they represent? What a mistake that would be.
Hawking himself had not been spared from the triumph of the insurgents. Before the Brexit vote he spoke out that a “Leave” victory would adversely impact scientific research in Britain, that it would be a step backward, yet the electorate -- or at least a sufficiently significant proportion of it -- took as much notice of his views as any of the other political leaders, trade unionists, artists, scientists, businessmen and celebrities who all gave the same unheeded advice and voted decisively to ditch the EU and its ugly parent, globalism.
The concerns underlying these votes about the economic consequences of globalisation and accelerating technological change are real. They are understandable. Governments sang the praises of globalism without attempting to explain its complexities and inherent disruptions, possibly because in their minds, there were only positives which could result, and any period of transition would be mercifully brief. The price of that hubris resulted in the automation of factories which eviscerated jobs in traditional manufacturing, and the relentless rise in the cult of artificial intelligence is likely to extend this job destruction deep into heart of the middle classes, with only a relatively small number of “new economy” jobs remaining.
This in turn will accelerate the already widening economic inequality around the world. The internet and the platforms that it makes possible allow very small groups of individuals to make enormous profits while employing very few people. Technology is leading us down the path of driverless buses, self-actuated mass rapid transit systems. Even jet fighters that will be able to fly themselves. This is inevitable. It is even “progress,” but it is also socially divisive, and ultimately, even destructive.
We need to put this alongside the financial crash, which brought home to people that a very few individuals working in the financial sector can accrue huge rewards and that the rest of us underwrite that success and be stuck with the bill when their greed leads them astray. So, taken together we are living in a world of widening, not diminishing, financial inequality, in which many people can see not just their standard of living, but their ability to earn a living at all, disappearing. It is no wonder then that they were (and still are) searching for a new deal, which Trump and Brexit might have appeared to represent.
It is also the case that another unintended consequence of the global spread of the internet and social media is that the stark nature of these inequalities is far more apparent than it has been in the past. For Hawking, the ability to use technology to communicate was a liberating and positive experience. Without it, he would not have been able to continue working these many years past, and we would neither have benefitted from his discoveries and his example.
But it also means that the lives of the richest people in the most prosperous parts of the world are transparently visible to anyone, however poor, who has access to a cellular phone. And since there are now more people with a telephone than access to clean water in places like sub-Saharan Africa, this will shortly mean nearly everyone on our increasingly crowded planet will not be able to escape the inequality being shoved in their faces every day.
The consequences of this are plain to see: the rural poor flock to cities, to shanty towns, slums and favelas, driven by hope. And then often, finding that the Instagram nirvana is not available there, they seek it overseas, joining the ever-greater numbers of economic migrants in search of a better life. These migrants in turn place severe new demands on the infrastructures and economies of the countries in which they arrive, undermining tolerance and further fuelling political populism. The Syrian refugees, the Rohingya, we’ve seen this wheel turn so many times before.
For Hawking, the really concerning aspect of this is that now, more than at any time in our history, our species needs to work together. Humanity faces vast environmental challenges: climate change, food production, overpopulation, the decimation of other species, epidemic disease, acidification of the oceans, an ever-widening age gap demanding larger shares of the privy purse.
Together, they are a reminder that we are collectively at the most perilous moment in the development of humanity, almost equalling the threat of Nazism so few generations ago. We now have the technology to obliterate the planet on which we live, yet have not yet developed the ability to escape it. Perhaps in a few centuries, we will have established human colonies among the stars, but at this time we have but one planet, and we need to work together to protect it. Small wonder that Hawking’s pronouncements became increasingly shrill, his unbounded optimism tinged with worry for our race’s longevity.
To do that, we need to break down, not build up, barriers within and between nations. If we are to stand a chance of doing that, the world’s leaders need to acknowledge that they have failed and are failing the many. With resources increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few, we are going to have to learn to share far more.
With not only jobs but entire industries disappearing (obscured by the innocuous fan-word ‘disruption’), we must help people to retrain for a new world and support them financially while they do so. If communities and economies cannot cope with current levels of migration, we must do more to encourage global development, as that is the only way that the migratory millions will be persuaded to seek their future at home.
We can do this, and Stephen Hawking was always an enormous cheerleader for our species; but it will require the elites, from London to Harvard, from Cambridge to Hollywood, to learn the lessons of 2016. To learn above all, a measure of humility and, rather than pontificate as to what is wrong with society, actually come up with workable solutions.
That’s the thing about belief. In his life Stephen Hawking was through his teachings and his example transport us from this world, with all its strife, anger, and hatred, to a more pleasant place. To a future where we will embrace anyone, regardless of shape, color, or ideology, as long as they embrace us. Where we look to the stars and see not opportunities to exploit or conquer, but instead, an opportunity to explore strange new worlds, seek out new life and new civilizations, and boldly go where no one has gone before.
Let’s follow the route to the stars that he has charted.