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sunflowers comments on What truths are actually taboo? - Less Wrong Discussion
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Do a before and after of the American labor movement with the central event being the Red Scare. Do a before and after of Christianity in Russia with the central event being the Bolshevik Revolution. Legal crackdowns can ultimately affect thought.
I'm not really familiar with US history, so let's talk about Christianity in Communist Russia. It wasn't merely marginalized, it was almost entirely outlawed after the Revolution.
The church organization was dismantled, its property and funds were confiscated, including most actual churches, and new ones were not allowed to be built. People could legally practice religion in private, but anyone who publicly declared their religion was forbidden from being a Party member, from holding any senior post, and generally was persecuted and oppressed. Many people (and in particular many priests) were persecuted much more harshly, being murdered, tortured, deported, etc. by the regime.
And after the Communist regime fell, in only a few years Russia has become about as publicly religious as the US. Which goes to show the Communist attempts at atheist education failed, in part because people were attracted to anything the Communists were against.
I don't see, in this example, either how the legal crackdown was marginalizing but not outlawing religion, or how it succeeded in affecting thought.
Yes, and that outlawing worked. Orthodoxy fell from holding near-universal adherence and being a pillar of state power to a fragmented, hated patchwork, which was re-allowed to exist during World War II as a submissive state organ.
While the state lasted, Russians really did become atheists and Marxists, though as Bertrand Russell footnotes his History of Western Philosophy, this practically meant replacing Tsar-worship with Stalin-worship. Criminalization led to marginalization. Similar things happened to "infantile leftist" communists and "factionalists," and with the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, militant anti-fascism.
These are just particularly dramatic examples. Unfortunately, not all censorship and oppression has the Streisand Effect. I think regimes would act at least a little differently if it did.
I thought you were going to bring up examples of how the law can marginalize something without making it illegal. Instead this is an example of the law marginalizing something by making it illegal. It seems we misunderstood one another.
I originally said that the law couldn't (merely) marginalize something, it could only outlaw it entirely (and then it might be marginalized or disappear entirely). So, if the German politicians want to marginalize Holocaust denial, the only legal tool they have is to outlaw it entirely.
Ah, we were talking about different things, then. But yes, I think it can do that too. I think that Supreme Court rulings helped to make racism taboo. Returning to the labor movement, passing laws that prohibit forming closed-shop contracts are a great indirect means of marginalizing labor, or simply the non-enforcement of laws against firing labor organizers.
... which is significantly lower than before it was outlawed.
Had it never been officially discouraged in the first place, I would still expect it to be less popular in 2013 than 1913. Wouldn't you?
The "secularization hypothesis" is seductive and common, but if you google, you'll see that it's debated whether societies do in fact become less religious as they get richer.
Honestly, I'm so uninformed any opinion I have on the subject is almost totally uncertain. I've typed out multiple replies to this comment, and deleted them all because I simply didn't have a high enough confidence rating. Sorry!
OTOH, religions can either get more or less popular, so all things being equal (which I doubt they are in real life) lowered popularity is evidence for the laws working.
But is still higher than other Western countries today, and is a very sharp rise over the past twenty years, which may be still continuing.
Would this be true if communism hadn't fallen?
Still, you're right, it doesn't seem to have stuck.