[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 35, Number 4 (Monday, February 1, 1999)]
[Pages 123-125]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
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 
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 a thousand 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.

[[Page 124]]

    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.
    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

[[Page 125]]

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. In the President's remarks, he 
referred to physicist Stephen W. Hawking and civil rights leader Rev. 
Jesse Jackson. The lecture, ``The Meaning of the Millennium,'' was 
presented by Natalie Zemon Davis, professor emeritus, Princeton 
University, and Martin E. Marty, director, the Public Religion Project. 
The transcript made available 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.