Navigating an Age of Change
Next year we are publishing our book entitled, Two 20th Century Men in the 21st Century: The Changing Context of Our Lives.
This video provides an overview to that book.
This book delivers an unflinching examination of what it means to live through significant historical disruption and transformation within a single lifetime.
Robbin Laird and Kenneth Maxwell, born into the post-war world of the 1940s, began their journey begins in a world that now reads like fantasy: when typewriters shaped thought through their demand for precision, when research required physical pilgrimage to libraries, when the Cold War’s terrifying clarity at least provided comprehensible threats and responses. Maxwell survived the London Blitz as a child; Laird grew up practicing nuclear attack drills in American schools. Both inherited what they call the “wisdom of silence” from parents who had survived the Great Depression, a generation that understood scarcity, preparation, and the fragility of social order.
The post-industrial transition of the 1970s-90s provided their first education in adaptability. They watched America’s foreign policy consensus shatter from Vietnam to Watergate, witnessed Europe’s emergence as an independent force, and navigated the early digital revolution that began rewiring human cognition itself. France’s Minitel system, operational a decade before most Americans touched the internet, proves that technological destiny isn’t inevitable, different societies can choose radically different paths toward digital integration.
September 11, 2001, marked the definitive end of their world. Not just because of the attacks themselves, but because of what the intelligence failures revealed: analysts trapped in Cold War thinking, unable to process the reality of non-state actors weaponizing globalization against its creators. The “endless wars” that followed represented, in their analysis, America’s descent into the same imperial delusions that had destroyed European powers decades earlier.
Both men’s confrontations with mortality, Maxwell’s brain tumor, Laird’s near-death from pancreatitis and subsequent battle with melanoma, crystallized a brutal philosophy: “What is really going to mess you up in your life you probably have not even considered.” This isn’t pessimism but realism about the fundamental unpredictability of consequential threats.
Their assessment of the current moment is stark. Putin’s seizure of Crimea in 2014 marked authoritarian powers’ open challenge to the liberal order. China’s rise represents an existential threat precisely because it emerged from within the globalized system, using democratic societies’ own economic choices against them. The COVID-19 pandemic revealed not just supply chain vulnerabilities but governments’ willingness to weaponize public fear.
Yet this isn’t a book of despair but of hard-won wisdom. Maxwell and Laird argue that while “the liberal democratic management of the global order may be over in its current form,” democratic principles remain “humanity’s best hope.” The challenge isn’t to restore the past but to develop new institutional forms adequate to radically changed circumstances.
Their message is clear: adaptation requires abandoning comfortable illusions and embracing uncomfortable realities. Survival demands intellectual honesty, institutional creativity, and the courage to build rather than merely preserve.