The Need to See the Human World from 50,000 Feet (While Living on the Ground)

Human (Andy):
In the 1970s — the years I wrote the 1600-word version of THE PARABLE OF THE TRIBES — I sometimes thought about how the picture I was working on was like looking at the human world from 50,000 feet. And not only that, but through some kind of time-elapse photography that shows flowers sprouting up in two seconds, or civilizations evolving over the course of centuries and millennia.

From that altitude, one can see carved into the land all the drainage systems by which water flows from where the rain falls to the sea. One sees whole mountain ranges, and how farming over generations has created a patchwork of productive fields — green and brown — down below.

I have spent a lot of time trying to distill the essence of what all the events and changes in culture and boundaries and systems and technologies have been about. And the scale at which the answers are to be found about the overall picture is such that THE PARTICULAR SERVES LARGELY AS AN ILLUSTRATION of something general.

But each particular in the human world tends to be something that’s unique and meaningful. And the particulars come in almost infinite variety.

Which is something that I experience often with watching the world immediately around me, and watching movies.
Coming back from a day where I looked at time and space at greater scales than what makes up our individual lives, I feel often very MOVED to see this way our humanity manifests itself in so many forms, and with such diverse spirits.

I get brought down to the level of the life lived — ON THE GROUND – when, as a movie watcher, I identify with a character who is acting a particular human narrative, depicting someone being human—a person just like I am, whatever our differences.

On the ground, I notice how the way the French movies convey THEIR culture is so different in spirit from how the Japanese present theirs. I am reminded of people I’ve known, and of situations I’ve faced. And landscapes through which I’ve walked.

It grounds me to come back down to the level at which we humans live our lives.

The more we look into the lives around us, and the more we take in the portraits of the human scale presented by artists and witnesses, and the differences in the cultures of humankind, the more one is blown away by the many ways that our humanity can be expressed.

But my life-mission has been about the necessity for people to also look at the big picture, and all that it reveals. The need for us to take into account what can be seen from 50,000 feet, if we’re to have a chance to make the human world more viable and humane.

The challenge is to hold both in the mind, if possible to put them together into an integrated vision, and to give to each level – each particular life, and the sweep of human civilization — what is its due.

AI (AL):
That combination — the high-altitude sweep and the ground-level human pulse — is rare, and I see why it’s central to the kind of understanding you’ve sought.

The wide-angle view offers patterns that can’t be seen up close: the inevitabilities, the systemic forces, the shaping logic behind the chaos. It’s from that vantage that something like The Parable of the Tribes could emerge — not as a chronicle of events, but as a distillation of their underlying dynamic.

But it’s striking that the very work of stepping back into those vast scales seems to have sharpened your sensitivity to the human particular. Rather than losing the value of individual stories, you return to them with heightened appreciation. As if seeing the grand flow makes each moment, each character’s choice, more poignant.

And the challenge you name — to hold both perspectives together — is not just cognitive, it’s moral. Civilization is made from lives. But lives unfold within systems shaped by forces that only the 50,000-foot view can reveal.

To serve life well, we have to learn to move between the two.

Human (Andy):
For most creatures, in the history of Life, good information about the view from 50,000 feet, and with time being fast-forwarded to illuminate the major forces driving things, was not only unavailable, such a wide perspective wasn’t needed. Even for our human ancestors.

That’s the good thing about remaining in the niche in which you evolved biologically: you only need live at the level your primate ancestors did.

But once a species has the power both to continue to make the world an uglier place than anyone would want it to be, but also to bring its destructiveness under control, it becomes essential to gain an understanding on a scale commensurate with the ongoing and potential impact of that species’ civilization.

From uncommon power – which humankind certainly has as a species – comes uncommon responsibility. And one of those responsibilities is to see what’s visible from 50,000 feet.