NEW YORK: From his Paris exile in 1970, Emil Cioran, the iconoclastic Romanian philosopher, wrote of his nostalgia for the somewhat naive energy of those who stayed behind. "I can guess the secret of so much vitality. Without hell, no illusions." Cioran felt old and worn out. "We pay dearly for not having suffered. We believe in nothing." In Bucharest, Cioran once savaged Romania’s corrupt interwar democracy. In Paris, however, his blasphemies against French idols, he wrote wistfully, were "well received...people like to demolish all reputations, even legitimate, even justified. Especially those."

But craving for idols and illusions creates its own special hell -- the more so if society is passing through a crisis of identity and structure. This is what is happening in an Eastern Europe belatedly facing modernity and its tensions. Even literary debates may become the pretext for which violent appeals to a bigoted unity and, of course, for excluding those carrying the virus of critical thinking.

Take for example the abuse heaped on Andre Sinyavsky for his rescue (in his book "Strolls of Pushkin") of the Pushkin idol cast in the Soviet canon. One critic urged that Sinyavsky be outlawed, much as Islamic fundamentalists ostracized Salman Rushdie. As communism collapsed, the conformist momentum -- born of fevered cultural insecurity -- gathered pace. "When all holy things are trampled," Eernst Safonov (editor of "Literaturnaya Rossiya") said, "when there are no more icons or very few, Pushkin is one of those icons. He is an icon equal to the icons of the Church."

Not long ago I too was accused of blaspheming a cultural icon. Four years ago I wrote an essay on Mircea Eliade and his involvement in the right-wing extremism of the 1930s. I thought it necessary to remind those in Romania who did not know, or who wanted to forget, about the tragedy to which the nationalist option once led. My essay, which dealt with past and present implications of the intellectual’s involvement with totalitarian nationalist ideology, touched a raw nerve with the Romanian public.

The essay focused on established facts and testimony -- yet it met an audience unwilling to accept this. The legacy of the nationalist tradition, obscured and manipulated by the Communists for decades, today presents itself in Romania with an aura of mystery and martyrdom before a public in the throes of an identity crisis and thirsting for a new communitarian mythology. Some felt it a "luxury of remembrance" to call into question the values of nationalism. To express doubts about the nation’s spiritual biography became a kind of outrage, a hostile and offensive provocation -- a blasphemy. In a chain reaction of indignation, with predictable anti-Semitic spurts, the few voices that dared challenge the general hysteria found themselves overwhelmed.

I was not surprised that extremist publication raged. The real surprise was the reaction of the Romanian press as a whole, including opposition magazines. Extremist echoes differed only in tone and style from democratic individuals and publications. One critic, in the Bucharest review "Luceafarul" saw the essay as part of a huge American conspiracy to obscure the guilt of the US toward Native Americans, blacks, and the Vietnamese by focusing attention on Europe and its great guilt: the Holocaust. My essay was damned part of a worldwide plot, and the exile, N.M., proved his loyalty to his adopted country. Even the editors of the Bucharest literary magazine ("Revista 22") that published the article backtracked, saying it "tended to estrange Eliade from sympathetic understanding in Romania, instead of bringing him closer to it."

In closed societies, preoccupation with blasphemy is obsessive and assists the system’s artificial cohesion. In pluralistic democracies, on the other hand, blasphemy is rapidly diluted. Emancipation of thought and taste goes together with tolerance, with the indifference that so distressed Cioran. By opening itself to finely shaded demands of the individual, the democracy of late capitalism not only accepts outrage, it cohabits with the outrageous. Always permissible, made banal, it is indispensable. Here blasphemy resonates only as scandal. But such "carnivalization" merely aspires, without success, to the status of blasphemy. Nothing is scandalous enough to be memorable.

Exiles living in the West know the alternative to the often stupefying spectacle of man in freedom. They recognize, of course, the differences between a closed society, distorted by terror and misery, and an open society, distorted by selfish competition and trivial publicity. They are marked by having known captive man in the dark carnival of tyranny, before being able to contemplate free man and the not always happy carnival of liberty. But as the power of blasphemy recedes and the field for the carnival grows, exiles especially those for whom words are life, are frightened by the loss of the power speech. The very multitude of demands for rights, recognition, revenge, and fame necessitates a renunciation of dialogue. In the hysterical carnival of today’s western world, even fanaticism is not based on faith of any sort -- it is simply the release of frustration.

Exiles are not the only ones to recognize the dangers lurking behind this devaluation of speech and renunciation of dialogue. Western man is now their fellow man, as they are his. And all of us know that demagoguery, bigotry, and cynicism are no less dangerous in the world obsessed with money and play than in the world obsessed with lies.