I'll follow Eliot's call for the artist and intellectual to remain impersonal. The work matters. Or, as Tennyson says, "Better use than fame."

The purpose of the journal is to provide a space for public commentary on issues that strike me as important or interesting -- and so offers no promise of design or coherence.

The journal's title is the closing line of Yeats' "The Circus Animals' Desertion." I've chosen it to reflect, ironically, a certain modern angst about the state of civilization when held against a transcendent expectation or utopian ideal that has failed. Is the sky really falling? No. That's as naive an assessment of contemporary world politics and cultures as historical apocalyptic thinking.

At our best, I believe an awareness that we must work with the world as it is, not as we wish it to be, allows us to work all the harder to advance the cause of civiliation. Although I acknowledge the term "civilization" to be tainted by its association with nineteenth-century imperialist ideology, I hope to recuperate it as a shared standard embodying

universal civil liberties and human rights,

the rule of law,

educational enlightenment,

scientific discovery,

artistic expression,

participatory democracy,

a regulated but otherwise free and competitive market,

and social progress -- the kind of social progress that eschews fundamentalism and zealotry of all stripes, respects difference, and puts it into rational, productive dialogue.

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