[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1999, Book I)]
[January 25, 1999]
[Pages 103-106]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at the Fifth Millennium Evening at the White House
January 25, 1999

    The President. Thank you very much. I would like to take about the 
last four sentences of Professor Marty's 
talk and emblazon it in the consciousness of every human being on the 
face of the Earth.
    This is a wonderful night. I'd like to begin by thanking the First 
Lady for leading our Millennium 
Project and by bringing these two remarkable people here. I'm terribly 
impressed with both of them. They took about 40 minutes, by my count, 
and did the last 1,000 years and the entire future. [Laughter] Took me 
an hour and 17 minutes the other night to talk about one year. 
[Laughter]
    I also want to express my gratitude to both of you for not making 
fun of those of us who insist on ignoring the Gregorian calendar and 
proclaiming the millennium next New Year's Eve at midnight. [Laughter]
    I thought Professor Davis did a 
great service to all of us who are less well-read in what happened 1,000 
years ago by debunking some of the popular myths. Clearly, not everyone 
was giving away all their possessions or cowering in churches waiting 
for the world to end. Maybe what was said tonight will discourage some 
of our fellow citizens who seem determined to buy desert land and hoard 
gold, bullets, and Skoal in their pickup trucks. [Laughter] I don't 
know. You laugh; this is a major source of conversation every morning in 
the White House here. [Laughter]
    I also thank her for reminding us 
about the bold voyages of discovery, the important advances in human 
knowledge. I thank her for

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reminding us that people were, and I quote what she said, ``enmeshed in 
reading texts together.'' Who would have thought about book clubs 1,000 
years ago?
    I thank her for telling us about the 
medieval Peace of God movement, which has a millennial connection to us 
in what has been going on in Northern Ireland, the Balkans, the Middle 
East, Africa. I thank her, too, for reminding us that ordinary people, 
even a long time ago, can make a difference to a good end.
    I thank Professor Marty for his 
fundamental insights, for reminding us to be both hopeful and humble. He 
asked all these questions. I enjoyed Professor Hawking being here and trying to deal with all these questions of 
time: how we measure time; why do we care so much about the millennium, 
or a century, or a year, or our birthdays and anniversaries, for that 
matter? We have to have some way of organizing our thoughts and our 
plans against the mysteries of time and timelessness. We have to find 
some way of explaining our poor efforts to fulfill our own destinies and 
to live out our small piece of God's design. Most of us, sooner or 
later, come to the conclusion that life really is a journey, not a 
destination, until the end. But we all still need a few benchmarks along 
the way to get there.
    I thank them both for ending on a note of hope and for recognizing that you 
cannot have hope without faith--for believers, faith in God--and in the 
end you cannot practice hope without charity or love.
    One of the dilemmas I constantly confront as President is the 
necessity of believing in the idea of progress, with the certainty of 
man's and woman's constant demonstration of making the same old mistakes 
over and over again, millennium after millennium, in new and different 
guises, and the certainty that perfection cannot be achieved in this 
life.
    I think there is a way to reconcile the idea of progress with the 
frailty of humanity. I think that you can make a case that, on balance, 
the world is a better place today than it was 1,000 years ago for people 
who have had a chance to drink fully of life's possibilities. I think 
you can make a case that we are obliged, all of us as human beings, to 
try to extend that opportunity to more and more of our fellow citizens 
on this small planet. And Mr. Goldin's 
successors in interest will be taking us into outer space to see if we 
can find some others somewhere else to worry about 1,000 years from now.
    We thank Professors Davis and 
Marty for giving us a chance to make some 
sense of the millennium and for reminding us, in the end, that the only 
meaning it will have is the meaning we give it in our own lives.
    Thank you very much.
    Now, I'd like to ask Ellen Lovell to take 
over the floor and turn over the floor to all of you and to the 
thousands who are joining us, thanks to technology, for some questions.
    Ellen.

[At this point, Ms. Lovell, Director, White 
House Millennium Council, and the First Lady led the question-and-answer portion of the evening. 
The following question from the Internet was directed to the President.]

    The First Lady. This is from Dr. 
Joseph W. Epstein, from Monroe, New York, and it's for the President: 
Should the dawning of this new millennium see a greater participation of 
scientists in studies aimed at preserving our environment and 
recapturing what has been lost? Government and business incentives would 
be required to encourage scientists in these areas. Hopefully, a person 
who recaptures a rain forest could receive as much acclaim as the batter 
of ever more home runs. Thank you. [Laughter]
    The President. Well, the short answer to his question is, obviously, 
yes. If you look at--one of the things I was going to say in my closing 
remarks I'll just say now to respond to this question, because we don't 
have enough time for everybody to ask a question, for us all to have a 
conversation. I wish we did.
    I think something that would be helpful for all of you is if, when 
you go home tonight, before you go to bed, if you would take out a piece 
of paper and a pencil or a pen, and write down the three things that 
you're most worried about, with the dawn of the new millennium, and the 
three things that you're most hopeful about. And then ask yourself what, 
if anything, can you do about either one?
    Now, I think, with the growth of the world's population and with the 
emergence of a new economy based more on ideas and information and 
technology and less on industrial patterns of production, we still see 
an enormous destruction of the world's resources. And the most serious 
problem is the problem of climate change, global warming.

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    The rain forest is important for a lot of reasons--he mentioned the 
rain forest--because an enormous percentage of the oxygen generated from 
non-ocean sources comes from rain forests; because well over half the 
plant and animal life on the globe lives in the rain forests; and 
therefore, the answers to some of my most profoundly important medical 
questions lie in the rain forest, quite apart from our responsibility to 
preserve it just for what it is.
    So we have put a lot of emphasis on trying to create more financial 
and other incentives for people to deal with climate change and global 
warming, to try to help to save the rain forests. And I have, for years, 
kind of brooded about the prospect of having a global alliance between 
governments, chemical companies, and others that would have an interest 
in it, in joining together, in effect, to pay to save the rain forests. 
The Government of Brazil actually has a program there where they try to 
invest and set aside large tracts of rain forest land.
    But I think one of the things that is going to happen in the next 
century is that we will move very close to the limits of our body's 
ability to live. I think you're going to see an exponential increase in 
life expectancy in the next 30 years or so. And to go back to what you 
said, I think that it's going to aggravate the underclass problem 
because you have, in countries where the health system is breaking down, 
a decline in life expectancy. Now, where that's going on, there will be 
more and more pressure to develop more and more scientific discoveries 
and also to more democratically spread it and to lift people out of 
poverty. I think that there has to be an enormous amount of money and 
incentives and time and thought given to how a lot of countries can skip 
a stage of economic development that would otherwise require them to 
destroy what remains of the world's natural resources and put us in a 
position where we could never solve this global warming problem.
    And that's why I signed the Kyoto treaty on climate change, why I 
have pushed it so hard. I think it can be the organizing principle to 
get to the objective that our questioner asks. Unfortunately, my 
successors will have to do a lot of the work, but I hope we'll at least 
have laid the foundation for it, because it will be one of the most 
significant public questions of the next, not just the next century, the 
next couple of decades. It would be on my list of three.

[The question-and-answer portion of the evening continued. The President 
then made closing remarks.]

    The President. Well, I will be very brief. First of all, I think we 
should thank our speakers again. They were magnificent. [Applause]
    Secondly, I would like to say that I think we all leave here feeling 
that we now have more questions than we did when we showed up, which 
means they succeeded. I would just like to leave you with this one 
thought. You all know that I am a walking apostle of hope and progress. 
The question is, how do you pursue it without arrogance, with 
appropriate humility, and without a definition that is too narrow?
    Reverend Jackson asked a question about 
Africa, and Dr. Marty gave a great rejoinder 
about how we had to be more concerned because there were more and more 
Christians growing in Africa and fewer elsewhere. I would like to ask 
you to think about another thing.
    Our whole sense of time and marking time is so rooted in the 
development of our various monotheistic philosophies, Christianity for 
me and for many of you, or Judaism or Islam. How do you think this whole 
discussion would sound tonight to a serious Buddhist or a serious 
Confucian? How would we argue with them about the idea of progress? How 
would they argue with us about the idea of the immutable? How can we 
reconcile the two? Because in the end, that's what religious faith does. 
It gives you a sense of the timeless and a sense of what you're supposed 
to do with your time.
    And I just--this has been thrilling for me. But I hope all of you 
will remember the question I asked you. And if you feel so inclined 
later, feel free to write to me about the things that you're most 
worried about and the most hopeful about, and what you think I ought to 
spend my time between now and the millennium doing for you and the rest 
of the world.
    Thank you. Join us in the dining room for a reception. Thank you 
very much.

Note: The White House Millennium Evening program began at 7:37 p.m. in 
the East Room at the White House. The lecture, entitled ``The Meaning of 
the Millennium,'' was presented by Natalie Zemon Davis, professor 
emeritus, Princeton University, and Martin E. Marty, director, the 
Public Religion Project. In his remarks, the President referred to 
physicist Stephen W. Hawking

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and civil rights leader Jesse Jackson. The transcript released by the 
Office of the Press Secretary also included the remarks of the First 
Lady, Professor Davis, and Professor Marty, as well as the question-and-
answer portion of the evening. The lecture was cybercast on the 
Internet.