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Thomas Rhiel, The Eye’s editor in chief, and Raphael Pope-Sussman, the magazine’s deputy features editor, recently sat down with five Columbia faculty members to discuss the past ten years. The following is an edited transcript. You can listen to a few minutes of the conversation here.

Richard Betts is the Arnold Saltzman Professor of War and Peace Studies and the director of the Institute of War and Peace Studies. Victoria De Grazia is a professor of history and the James R. Barker Professor of Contemporary Civilization. Alexander Pasik is an associate professor of computer science specializing in information technology. Dana Pe’er is a professor of computational biology. John McWhorter is a lecturer in linguistics, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and a writer for the New Republic.

Thomas Rhiel: This decade has defined the intellectual life of our generation. Many of us were 10 or 11 in 2000, which means this was the first decade we paid attention to the political and cultural world. This is the decade we grew up in. But it’s not the decade you grew up in. It would be interesting to see how people with your life experience and scholarly expertise view the past 10 years. So the first and maybe most important question is: What should this decade be called?

John McWhorter: I don’t think anybody really knows. I call them the aughts, actually, which is a little antique because it usually refers to the aughts a century ago, and I would say most people don’t even know that, and people then did not usually call them that. But we need something, and it’s short and kind of charmingly antiquarian.

Alexander Pasik: I have an opinion. I think it’s the decade that needs to be fixed.

Victoria De Grazia: The disaster decade.

Richard Betts: The first post-post-Cold War decade.

Pasik: Actually, the first post-Cold War decade I liked. The second one I didn’t like.

Betts: That’s why it’s post-post.

TR: Speaking of disasters, is another George W. Bush possible in American political life?

Betts: Anything is possible in American political life. Nobody would ever have predicted, 10 years before the fact, that Ronald Reagan or Jimmy Carter could have become president of the United States. If that could happen, anybody could be president. So the answer is yes.

Dana Pe’er: I definitely think it could happen again. I have a low regard for the average American voter, and I was actually shocked that they were smart enough to choose Obama.

McWhorter: I would add to that that Obama’s wonderful, but what made a lot of people excited about him is that elusive thing known as charisma. And it comes in many forms. If there were a George W. Bush who was rather articulate and rather good-looking and knew how to play the news, it could easily happen again.

Pasik: Oh, it could easily happen again. It’s happened over and over again. It’s happened in my lifetime. It happens to the detriment of all. I mean, it’s almost nonsense that people would actually try and argue against evolution science. And what are we seeing happen? I read a statistic somewhere that 20 percent of people in America believe in evolution now. I mean, that’s astounding.

Pe’er: As a teacher of science at Columbia, I am shocked at how much worse the Americans are at science and math than the foreigners. I mean, Americans can write, but it’s shocking how much the American educational system does not prepare the American population for scientific thinking, for quantitative thinking, for analysis. I cannot express how shocking it is how even at one of the best schools in the country, how many of them come unprepared for science.

De Grazia: What I’ve found so worrisome is this disjuncture between the kind of ruralization of the United States—giving a kind of a pejorative sense to that—and the image that Americans still have of the power, the prowess of the United States in all areas.

Raphael Pope-Sussman: This decade left us in two wars overseas. What lessons have we learned?

De Grazia: I’ve been shocked how little has been learned about Iraq, about what Iraq was before, and what the aims were initially. The end result is a society where it’s not easy to see the future for a lot of people. Nine hundred thousand casualties and most Americans think there were 9,000.

Betts: I think the Iraq experience especially—and Afghanistan—is a reminder, both of the limits of power and the provincialism of American idealism based in globalization and Americanization. Lately there are more reminders that it isn’t that simple, and if you give people the opportunity to be free and democratic in ways that make sense to us, they don’t always grab it in the way that we assume they naturally would.

TR: How has Sept. 11, 2001 changed the texture of American life?

Pe’er: It didn’t become at all a moment for self-exploration—that was never done on the political level. It’s really terrible, because if there’s no elaboration of grief and no empathy with the parts of the world that experience this kind of catastrophe constantly, enacted many times since Iraq, then it turns perhaps into fear, and that seems to have been aggravated over the past 10 years. Fear is a powerful human emotion, and it can be misused.

Betts: I think it’s largely dissipated, and I think it’s evident in the swinging pendulum toward more skepticism about harsh practices in counter-terrorism. On Sept. 12, the only people making a peep about aggressive interrogation techniques would have been people on the political fringes—or people at Columbia, maybe—but hardly anybody who counts electorally. Now, I think people are much more relaxed because nothing has happened in the United States for a long time. I think there was an overreaction to 9/11 because Americans have been spoiled by their circumstances.

McWhorter: I will openly admit that I was quite afraid. I was living in the Bay Area. I’m afraid now. I am in constant grinding fear that it will happen again, because it will. The heritage of the whole thing for me has actually been an interest in what drives these particular terrorists, and terrorists in general and mass movements. I had never had occasion to dwell upon that as a linguist before 9/11, and since then, it’s interested me very much, to make sense of that mind-set and to figure out what, if anything, could address it.

De Grazia: This is a country which goes through these throes of terrorist fear—of Reds, of the anarchists—and it seems to be a very common way of organizing. It’s been a constant in this country’s existence to get a lot of different people together under the auspices of fear.

TR: What is to be made of the anti-government conservatism that’s been bubbling up over the past year? Is that something that will play a role in the next 10 years, or is it something that’s Obama-specific?

Betts: I think there’s an Obama edge on it, but it’s not the main cause. This kind of polarization and vocal excess of groups has been going on for a while. But the Obama edge is interesting, because it’s a little ambiguous where the line ends between the sort of radical right-wing agitation that’s been going on for a long time and the apparently visceral reaction painting him as illegitimate.

McWhorter: I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that there is this 24-hour cycle of people who just run their mouths. The idea of there being 20 little Rush Limbaughs on the radio in every city—that wasn’t true 20 years ago. There were some people like that, but it wasn’t a staple of every radio market. And then you have the Internet, which means that you can bring this sort of thing into your home all the time, and the world becomes this village where punchy oral messages can get to you in a way that was harder when you had to pick up a paper and read paragraphs. And so there was some of it in the old days, but it’s magnified by these technological changes. They will not go away. I mean, we’re stuck with that, and that’s why we could get another George W. Bush. He’d be on your laptop saying short punchy things all the time, and that wouldn’t have been as true 20 years ago.

Pasik: If you had asked me in the ’60s and ’70s if I could imagine the world the way it is today, I would say, “No way.” We’ve always been a center country. We’re not extreme to the left or the right. But there was this shift to the left, and now it’s Reagan. And I don’t mean what’s going on in politics. I mean what’s going on in little towns everywhere, the voters. The voters shifted to the right. So that when you talk about the radical right wing, for me, yeah, maybe there’s a bunch of radical right-wing organizers manipulating everything, but the vast majority of the people in the middle of the country are buying it! Here we are with a Democratic president, and a Democratic Congress, and we can’t pass something as simple as nationalized health care? We can’t even talk about it as nationalized health care. We have to pretend it’s not.

Betts: Lyndon Johnson couldn’t pass it either. I think the center has begun to edge back again in the leftward direction, only modestly. I mean, after Roosevelt the center moved left, and after Reagan it moved decisively right. Now I don’t mean to be Panglossian about it, but I think there’s a sort of natural pendulum swing that keeps American politics in a certain rhythm.

De Grazia: The United States actually had very good health care down through the ’70s. Oddly, ours measured well in terms of delivery and coverage with respect to the Europeans, with their systems. The problem is, there has been this unraveling over the last 30 years, and that’s where we’re at.

Pasik: What I don’t understand, I wish someone could explain this to me: How is it that the average American that I’m hearing who sits there and says, “I don’t want the government controlling my health care,” doesn’t realize the for-profit insurance companies are controlling their health care. I don’t get it! Why can’t—why don’t they see that?

McWhorter: Well, I think I’m a Panglossian in that I see progress happening. It’s just that, as one expects, progress happens in a slow, dull, dramatically unengaging way. We’re going to get a watered-down, non-public health care option that’s better, and once everybody realizes that the world will not fall apart, that in 20 years—I never expected anything better than that.

Betts: There is a basic problem though. I think that the problem is most people don’t want to face the choices. Because the real problem is that health care has become much more expensive, and people don’t want to make choices between paying for it and giving up services. And nobody politically from either the left or the right is forcing that choice.

De Grazia: It’s all going to be outstripped by the fact that in class terms, in stratification terms, in this country—we’re getting more and more poor people in this country with no insurance, and there’s a growing tendency toward there to be sick people in terms of class. These are really big problems that are not just—I mean—they’re part of the whole health care system, but they’re not going to be solved by the reform of insurance only. There’s going to have to be a sort of massive transformation of how medicine—how health care—is delivered.

Pe’er: The amazing thing is that the technology for it exists, or is in the works. Diagnostic, preventive—and because health care is such a big business, and these businesses have such big lobbies—like, I can, from this decade, give an example. There’s something called micro-rays, which are these little measurement technologies where you could actually measure the state of a cancer cell. And it’s been shown by research that these micro-rays can be used as sort of a diagnostic to tell you whether this chemotherapy treatment is going to work for you or not. And the Japanese, the Europeans, they directly went and began developing these tools. And the micro-rays were deemed by the pharma-lobby unusable. They weren’t accurate enough, and they couldn’t be used as diagnostics. And the American pharma-industry set the U.S. back 10 years, behind Europe and the Far East, because some pharma-driven lobby passed the wrong, stupid law in the FDA, so they could sell more chemotherapy.

RPS: Bringing it back to the economy. What’s American capitalism going to look like in the next decade?

McWhorter: The same as it has so far. I think there are pretty strong imperatives that will keep the essential system in place. There will always be loopholes. There will always be creativity. I—no Panglossianism here—we’re going to go back to the same stuff.

De Grazia: So long as the Chinese buy American treasury bills, it’ll stay the same—but it’s not likely that that can keep up. The Chinese effect on our economy has been to bring down inflation, to allow all kinds of part-time work, with no insurance: the Walmart effect. And that is a very well-run finance capitalist firm, Walmart. Their industrial jobs have been moved out, and there’s been no structural adjustment in this country. There’s been a decline in all kinds of services which are connected to big industry. As a model, the Walmart model is the prevailing one.

Pe’er: But all these things require education. I think the core of what’s wrong with your Walmart, rural America model is that you need—for a factory job, it’s pretty menial labor—you don’t need much education. And now, to do something other than the Walmart model, you need education. You need good education in all these areas. Health care has the capacity to give people the minimum, but that sort of will just keep people, you know, healthy. If you want to actually make them economically viably competitive, both within the U.S. and globally, now that the economy’s become global, education needs to be improved.

TR: This is the decade of both Hurricane Katrina and Barack Obama. I was wondering: Where are we in terms of race relations in this country, and where are we going?

Pasik: Well, I’ll tell you what my kids say. My kids are a little bit younger than you, and they think that race has become almost a non-issue. I was just shocked, impressed by that. Because us, growing up through the civil rights era, viewed it optimistically, as a dream. But could they be right? I don’t know, because I’m not in their shoes.

Pe’er: That’s a little New York optimism. I think that we’re in a little bubble, and the rest of the U.S. does not look like that.

De Grazia: In a country that is based in slavery and apartheid, why would you not continue to have a race problem and have it reworked in many different ways?

Pe’er: Katrina happened because they were poor. If it had hit a rich neighborhood, it wouldn’t have been Katrina—you would have had the entire armed forces saving them.

McWhorter: What your kids said is important to hear because we’re really not your kids. They’re living in a completely different world, and they’ll be grown-ups very soon, and they knew a world that I never knew, in terms of race. And of course, there are also things that your kids can’t perceive. I think it’s just a matter of degree. There is racism, of course, and something comes up all the time—but is it what it used to be? And I think that it isn’t—and I think that Obama’s election really was part of that. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t still the idiots, but I think that there are such bigger problems now. We’re talking about global warming, we’re talking about health care, we’re talking about education which is so lousy that we can even see it in the preparation of Columbia students. Things do change slowly, and I think racism has been one of those things.

Betts: I think it’s become more and more evident that racism is not “respectable” the way that it was, even in my own lifetime. It’s gradually, but steadily, become de-legitimized. Now all of a sudden, there’s been this dramatic event that sort of focuses the issue, and I think it’s no accident that you get a lot of people upset about Obama.

TR: OK, winding things up. This was the decade of a kind of resurgence in environmentalism. Is global warming something that will be taken more seriously in the next decade? Will it, by necessity, have to be taken more seriously?

De Grazia: If people’s house-cats start to die, there might be something.

Pasik: But if the country waits until it’s by necessity, then it’s too late.

Pe’er: Unfortunately, I fear it will wait by necessity. It’s one of the biggest threats to humanity itself—and we’re not going to get it until it’s too late, I fear.

Pasik: Well, I—let me be a little more optimistic. I think that we will do something about it, but not because it’s such a danger. We will do something about it because we’re greedy, and we will find economic reasons for doing something about it.

Betts: Well, the problem is a lot can be done, but it’s not clear that even if a lot is done, it’s going to make a critical difference. And to make a critical difference, it hasn’t been made clear how you can do it without wrecking the economy and putting us back figuratively to the Stone Age. So people don’t want to face a choice like that. So they will do a lot of green things, and it will help at the edges, but will it help in a way that averts the major problem?

McWhorter: Ten years ago, this conversation would have gone quite differently. The meme is out there in a way that is easy to forget now, because we’re in now. But the question’s premature, really, because it depends on what happens with this administration after health care happens. Because I think climate is going to be the next Big Thing, in capital letters, especially with the big summit coming up.

De Grazia: What would you say about the bigger problem, the American footprint? It’s so huge, globally in other words, this imperial way of life, that, given the other developing areas, China, India, Brazil, and how, how is that going to play out over time, that the U.S. is such an enormous consumer of resources?

Betts: It’s going to have a rival, in terms of emissions, in China.

De Grazia: Certainly.

Betts: And in India, to the extent that their economic development continues to succeed, it’s going to go pretty much in line with more emissions.

McWhorter: The technology’s going to have to be able to allow for that, to an extent. It’s a titanic country—how do you turn it?