University of Virginia Prof. Mark Edmundson is the author of Why Football Matters: My Education in the Game:

Football is a warlike game, and we are now a warlike nation. Our love for football is a love, however self-aware, of ourselves as a fighting and (we hope) victorious people.

Until the end of World War II, it was possible for us Americans to think of ourselves as warlike only by accident. Europe pulled us into World War I. Many Americans wished to stay out. And when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, we had no choice but to fight.

The soldiers who returned from the war by and large believed the United States was finished with conflict, at least for a long time to come. The United States was a peace-loving nation, and it had earned the right to peace.

Then came Korea, Vietnam, three wars in the Middle East and no end of flare-ups around the world. One may think our military engagements have been justified and necessary. But it is no longer really possible to think America is a deeply peaceful, or even a peace-loving nation.

That kind of thinking smacks of the era when the national game truly was baseball. That game is skill-based, nonviolent and leisurely. Grunting effort has almost no part in baseball: It’s about subtle prowess, well deployed. You can win a baseball game without hating your opponents: In fact, too much passion will probably undermine your skills.

But in football, as skilled as its players are, you had best hate your opponent, or at least simulate some hatred for the space of 60 minutes of play.

Football is urban, tough and based to a large degree on the capacity to overwhelm the other team with sheer force. Football is a tank attack, a sky-borne assault, a charge into the trenches for hand-to-hand fighting. Football is following orders and sticking to the strategy. It’s about acting as a unit and taking hits for the group.

Football is generals (coaches) and captains (quarterbacks) and the enlisted guys who play on the line.

Football is about destruction. Sure, you win by getting more points than the other team, but to get more points, you generally have to slam the life out of your opponents. You try to do away with their skill players — by violence. Knock out the first-string quarterback and chances are you willwin.

It is beautiful, to be sure. The wide receiver competes with the ballet dancer in grace and style. The runner recalls the flashing leopard, the tiger on the move. It’s lovely to watch. War can be beautiful, too, one understands. The bombs create a memorable light. The crack of rifles is its own music.

The rise of football over baseball is about a change in America’s self-image. We’ve been ready to fight always (ask the Indian tribes or the Spanish who controlled much of the Southwest), but we haven’t been ready to admit it. Now it’s harder to escape the truth.

When people are willing to get publicly enthusiastic about football, they are showing a willingness to get enthusiastic about struggle and strife — maybe even about war, if they feel it is necessary. Granted, almost all games are sublimations of war. But no game is as close to war without slipping over to war as football is.

Aristotle thought the purpose of a violent spectacle was to purge dangerous feelings from the audience. Tragedy discharged the excess of pity and fear that built up in individuals. They left the theater feeling clean.

But Plato says something different. Plato fears we become what we behold. See violence enacted on a stage and your capacity for violence will increase. To Plato, football would feed a national capacity for violent action and be fed by it in turn.

From this point of view, football and war could enter a mutually energizing relation with each other: the more football, the more war; the more war, the more football.

If the modern world is truly a place where a nation must be ready to fight constantly to survive, then perhaps football serves a general good. But whether the only way to thrive as a nation and a people is through the capacity for warfare, one can certainly doubt.

The poet William Blake looked forward to a day when the wars of swords would be over and when men and women would hash out their differences through argument and imagination, through what he called the arts of mental fight.

May that day come soon.

I’m not sure if Edmundson’s close is an indictment of just war or football as well. Chess as a spectator sport is unlikely to become popular, in the latter case. Edmundson’s quoting Plato is belied by the fact that football does not come close to the amount of off-field violence that has been found in soccer. (Including the Futbol War of 1969 between El Salvador and Honduras, which started with, yes, a soccer World Cup qualifying match, and ended with 3,000 dead Salvadorans and Hondurans in 100 hours. American football also has nothing in its history like the 1985 European Cup final, where 39 people died and 600 were injured before the final, and the match was played because of fears of more violence had the match been canceled. As far as football, Aristotle tops Plato.)

I also think Edmundson’s depiction of football as “urban” is inaccurate. Other than big cities in Florida and Texas, football is more a small-town sport. There are no football-power high schools in Milwaukee or Madison, though there are in the Milwaukee suburbs. The urban sport is really basketball. But come to a small town in Florida and Texas, and even in this state, and you will see where football rates.

It should be obvious that the modern world is truly a place where a nation must be ready to fight constantly to survive. It also should be obvious that, unless you think that such concepts as freedom and self-determination are unimportant enough to fight those would take those away, yes, the only way to thrive as a nation and a people is through the capacity for warfare.

More on the warlike game later.