    [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.