Stephen Adubato had a very interesting article in Mere Orthodoxy entitled, “Grilling Man at the End of History.” Adubato narrates how he grew up as a “privileged snowflake” of suburbia. Like many millennials and Gen Zs, he grew up struggling with “risks, unpredictability, and challenges.” Like many others, “we were afforded minimal independence. The general attitude of parents and educators led us to be averse to risk taking and learning from mistakes.” The result was a “bureaucratic form of problem-solving [and] atomized relational structures.” Adubato acknowledges the lack of “an existential horizon to imbue myself with a sense of dignity and to make sense of conflict and suffering.”
He refers to Umberto Galimberti who observes young people today are not well. They lack purpose resulting in nihilism. “For them the future has changed from promising to threatening.” A sense of interior bewilderment has resulted from the disintegration of the social fabric. Philosopher Mary Townsend writes, “suburbia is a breeding ground for nihilism.”
Adulbato then makes this statement. “A mentality that offloads responsibility onto distant officials and attempts desperately to sweep the danger, conflict, risk, unpredictability of existence and ultimately death itself under the rug fosters the illusion that we live in a universe where all risks can be managed, all engagements with reality should be mediated….But once you realize that there are wounds which can’t be fully healed, this same mentality begets the opposite idea: That in the end nothing will be OK.”
Our writer calls this “the Spirit of the Suburbs.” This flattened midcentury ideal of taming humanity produced “Grilling Man.” “The fantasy of the perfectibility of the human into the post-historical Grilling Man is determined to ignore the evidence that indicates that man is constantly in conflict with violent and destructive forces….. Like the powerful flows of the tide raging against a dam wall…..The ‘horizontal’ ideal of well-being is incapable of fully flattening out the yearning to reach for ideals that would have us gazing vertically toward the infinity of the cosmos, and of restraining our inner Augustinian restlessness. To be Grilling Man at the end of history is not fully satisfying for anyone.”
Adubato warns, “It will only be so long until we hit the wall that forces us to confront those forces beyond our rational wills, and that we lack the tools to make sense of and adequately deal with……..outbursts, whose roots are set deeply in our nature, are impervious to flat, sociological and psychological interventions from trained professionals.” But Adubato is not asking us to shun the grill and flee en masse from the suburbs into cities and rural areas.
The concerns of the young today are more existential. “To flock to existential fringes can feel as though one is opening to door to refreshing and meaningful questions that lead to a hopeful future, but what is behind those doors can also be hellish. To discern the way out of suburban suffocation without falling into any of the dark pits from which, at the cost of our humanity, it protects us, is difficult.”
Beware of the “Grilling Man,” who is a flattened out tamed man, afraid of taking manly initiative. A godly man is characterized by “”orientation, direction, order and responsibility” (Payne). For me this means, Jesus is Lord, He leads as I follow, He will prepare a way for me, and I need to take responsibility for my words and actions. Malachi 4:6 speaks to our culture: “He will turn the hearts of the parents to their children, and the hearts of the children to their parents; or else I will come and strike the land with total destruction.”
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