Doing What We Were Meant to Do
Masculine agency, by choosing to resist the status quo, makes a positive difference in the world.
We don’t exert our will to make a bigger mess, but we exert our will to make a positive difference. And the simplest way to think of a “positive difference” is to think: I’m going to leave this better than how I found it. And this can go for all kinds of things, big and small.
To leave it better than how you found it.
Imagine you make that your responsibility in everything you do. It doesn’t mean that you’re the one always solving the problem. Most of the time there’s no fanfare. But you are choosing, as resistance, to make something better. And I think we run this all the way down. It gets as basic as Don’t litter. Put your trash where trash goes.
Taking Ownership
I learned a lesson here I’ll never forget in high school baseball. My coach was a man named Pat Smith (he was just inducted into the Johnston County Athletic Hall of Fame). Coach Smith was notorious for being a hard-nosed coach. One day at the start of practice, we all ran a lap, but when we got back to him, he made us run one again. And then again. And then finally we got back to him, and he sat us in the dugout, and asked us “Whose home field is this?”
We said it was ours.
And he said, “You boys take pride in this field?
And said, Yeah of course! (we had a nice field and facility).
And then pointed to a plastic grocery bag blowing around in the outfield and said, “Y’all ran past that plastic bag three times and nobody picked it up.” (And I can tell you, I saw the bag. We all saw the bag, but we all figured somebody else would pick it up.)
Then he said, “When you care about something, you take ownership of it.” And when you take ownership of something, you’re not waiting for someone else to do what you should do.
That’s passivity, see — waiting for someone else to do what you should do. And the thing with passivity is that I’m sure you’re being polite. And I’m sure more people are going to like you. And I’m sure it’s very comfortable. But I’m also sure that you will make no positive difference. Masculine agency is men choosing to resist the status quo, pushing against what is easy, to accomplish what is good.
And men need to do this because men were made for this. We were made to take ownership. Jocko calls this extreme ownership. It means, as men, gladly assuming sacrificial responsibility, we look out in the world and say: Put that on my shoulders.
But put what on our shoulders? What exactly are men taking ownership of?
Civilization on Our Shoulders
You may think that I’m overspeaking in what I’m about to say, but I’m not. I mean this as profoundly as I can:
Men should take ownership of civilization.
I mean responsibility. Care. That’s how civilization was built — men being men, sacrificially exerting their will for the common good. (Starting with your family, your church, your city, your country.)
Anthony Esolen, in his book No Apologies: Why Civilization Depends on the Strength of Men, writes:
Look around you. Every road you see was laid by men. Every house, church, every school, every factory, every public building was raised by the hands of men.
You eat with a stainless-steel fork; the iron was mined and the carbon was quarried by men.
You type a message on your computer; the plastic it is made of came from petroleum dredged out of the earth, often out of earth beneath hundreds of feet of sea water, by men.
The electricity that powers your computer—where did it come from? Perhaps from an enormous turbine whirled about by countless tons of water, on a great river dammed up by men, or from a power plant burning coal, harvested out of the earth, with considerable risk, by men.
The whole of your civilization rests upon the shoulders of men who have done work that most people will not do—and that the physically weaker sex could not have done. (p. X).
Our world has always needed men — our world needs men today, and men need to act. That is masculine agency. It means men, as men, choose to resist the status quo to make a positive difference.
And we do it in a country, in a world, that many believe is on the brink of collapse. And it’s not quacks who are saying that, it’s trusted voices, James Davidson Hunter, Joshua Mitchel — they’re saying, from a sociological, historical perspective, things cannot continue as they have, and so what do we do as not just men, but Christian men?
It means that we look out, in all the fire and smoke and mess, and we choose to act in the name of Jesus, in all the grace that he supplies, resisting, we’re gonna do our best to leave it better, and we’re gonna save some.
Ultimately, all of our agency, all of our action in this world, is in light of the next, when “the kingdom of this world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign forever and ever” (Revelation 11:15).
Lord, help us! Amen.
This is an excerpt from the lecture, “Masculine Agency”, originally delivered at the 2024 Men’s Retreat.
