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.
【参考答案】
As a great thinker Miller understood what kind of damage the......