America Loses a Great Public Thinker Arthur Miller’s death last week meant more than the loss of an outstanding playwright. It was the loss of a great public thinker who believed strongly that the essence of America--its greatness was in its promises. 71. Miller knew what ignorance and fear and the madness of crowds, especially when exploited by sinister leadership, could do to those promises. 72. His greatest concerns, "were with the moral corruption brought on by bending one’s ideals to society’s dictates, buying into the values of a group when they conflict with the voice of personal conscience. "73. The individual in Miller’s view, had an abiding moral responsibility for his or her own behavior, and for the behavior of society as a whole. He said that "I felt that as improbable as it might seem, there were moments when an individual conscience was all that could keep a world from falling." Miller saw some of the differences in two sharply, defined eras: the depression--wracked 1930s and the prosperous postwar 1950s. It was perhaps around 1936, people who used to mind no polities began thinking for the first time of common action as a way out of their impossible conditions. 74. By the early 50s the agony of the Depression was gone. McCarthyism was in flower. After the 50’s, however, Americans became more practical and pragmatic. The dean of the University of Michigan was complaining that his students’ highest goal was to fit in with corporate America rather than to separate truth from falsehood. 75. "They become experts at grade-getting, but there’s less speculating about the wrongs of the world and ideal solutions something no employer was interested in." Now Miller is gone, and if we are not wise enough to pay attention, his uncomfortable truths will die with him.