Expressing the predictable and controlled and the unpredictable and uncontrollable as unavoidably linked aspects of human experience in the real world, gardens and forests (or jungles) serve here as metaphors grounded in different fields of human endeavor. Section 10.1 of this chapter explores some of these. Section 10.2 explores the garden of experiments and the forest of experimentation as different ways of operating under conditions of putatively controllable risk and acknowledged uncertainty. Section 10.3 concludes by considering parks as a hybrid of garden and forest, a terrain where Newtonianism and Post-Newtonianism can overlap. It also discusses the role of values in worldviews and discusses science and religion as the two reigning worldviews that help us understand and navigate an uncertain world.

This chapter discusses the concept of worldview; relates it to paradigms and substantialist and relational reasoning; maps Newtonianism and Post-Newtonianism (quantum mechanics) and humanism and hyper-humanism (scientific cosmology) as two different dimensions structuring implicit worldviews; specifies four analytical perspectives on world politics; and concludes briefly with two illustrative applications.

You know Hollywood, you are likely familiar with India’s Bollywood, and you may have heard of Nigeria’s Nollywood. There is also Chollywood in China, Wellywood in New Zealand, Lollywood in both Pakistan and Liberia, and several more in Africa. Such labeling of regional film industries reveals more than an attempt at a catchy gimmick. The reference to Hollywood in all these cases is clear, but so is the alternative desire to produce films that the Los Angeles-based studios are unable or unlikely to offer. Similar reinvention efforts have rebalancing consequences for the film industry, often beyond what their initiators intended. Each of the many “woods” caters to diverse tastes, some more and some less specific than those of Hollywood’s traditional target viewers. Most importantly, non-Hollywood film production undermines the pretense of control over cultural templates and meanings that move global audiences and even pushes traditionally powerful actors to abandon the assumptions of calculability.

Power is not ending, as the public intellectual and former editor of the journal Foreign Policy, Moisés Naím, argues.1 But it is true that in different political arenas big players are challenged by small ones who are using new playbooks that make power both more available and more evanescent. Naíim’s description of power dynamics is often on target; his exclusive focus on the erosion of control power is not. Otto von Bismarck, Germany’s “Iron Chancellor,” knew better. He did not aspire to “control the current of events, only occasionally to deflect them.”2 In a world of risk mixed with uncertainty it is the relations between protean and control power that shape the security of states, the competitiveness of economies, and the resilience of societies.