da Christians, da codes, and da Madonnas

What created Madonna and the da Vinci code?
Well, Christianity.
A Christian society is an orderly society.
A Madonna concert is a model of order. She may be hanging from a cross, mocking Christianity, but her ‘fans’ are sitting (mostly) in numbered assigned seats, the closeness of which is determined by their ability to pay. They don’t shoot each other, beat each other (mostly), and don’t rape, burn, or pillage. Madonna is thus given the freedom from fear and violence to be as much of an artist as her talent and crassness bestow. Christianity and Christian standards are her rabbits.

An interesting negotiation scenario is that of a fox and a rabbit deciding on what is for dinner. The smart fox won’t eat all the rabbits. He would soon starve. He needs rabbits to survive (substitute wolves and sheep if you wish). A smart, orderly little society of rabbits needs no fox to survive (provided they are smart and don’t become overcrowded and exhaust their own food supply).

In the wonderfully entertaining movie, “Art School Confidential,” the artists continually bash the “police state” that gives them the security to create the art that bashes the police state. (Even as the police search for a strangler killing at random). Ironic. In total ignorance of cause and effect, they seem to want to disable the power that keeps them safe. (The movie also illustrates a police state of sorts within the art community, dominated by the totalitarian bureaucratic control of what is and isn’t “art.”) In a strange reversal, the police state is their rabbit.

Would Madonna be noticed in a totally decadent society?
Too many Madonna’s would mean the notice of none. But she has no limits in bashing the society that allows her to become rich and sing.
Would The da Vinci code be interesting in an atheist society? Not without elves, magical dwarfs, and flying flesh of some sort.
Both are quite juvenile.

Thomas Hobbes wrote about such a world in Leviathan, long before the tame, gentle Madonna:
Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of war, where every man is enemy to every man, the same consequent to the time wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Overcoming the flesh is hard.
Christians often fail, but they embrace the glory, and reject the failure. The glory is the goal, the standard by which they are judged.

And as long as the glory is the goal, and more people try to meet the standard and fail than fail to even try, the failure will be known by Madonna’s and da Vinci codes.