Liberal NYT columnist Bob Herbert laments the passing of the thinker and playwright Arthur Miller.

An excerpt:

Mr. 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, as Archibald MacLeish had written, that the essence of America - its greatness - was in its promises. Mr. Miller knew what ignorance and fear and the madness of crowds, especially when exploited by sinister leadership, could do to those promises.

His greatest concerns, as Charles Isherwood wrote in Saturday's Times, "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."

The individual, in Mr. 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 while writing "The Crucible," "The longer I worked the more certain 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."

For the United States, which launched a misguided, pre-emptive war in Iraq, is shipping prisoners off to foreign countries to be tortured and has pressed the rewind button on matters of social progress, this may be one of those moments.