Are We Bloodthirsty Like the Romans?

Everybody is familiar with the image of the ancient Romans' entertainments in the Coliseum: gladiators fighting to the death, wild animals fighting one another, Christians being thrown to the lions (this last, it turns out, is completely a myth). So we regard the Romans as bloodthirsty and pat ourselves on the back for being more civilized than that.

But are we? I'd argue that modern Western peoples are probably just as bloodthirsty as the Romans were. The first example that might come to my mind is boxing, which is simply about one man hitting, punching, and beating up another one (I know, boxing's defenders will say that they look for, and admire, grace, strategy, this and that); and the crowd evidently loves it if/when blood flows. Not to mention that boxers' brains quite infamously get permanently damaged. (Mohammed Ali has Parkinson's disease; as Wikipedia says, "Ali was diagnosed with Parkinson's syndrome in 1984,. . . a disease to which those subject to severe head trauma, such as boxers, are many times more susceptible than average" [Wikipedia, s.v. Muhammad Ali].)

Then there's football. It's starting to be realized that professional football players can receive concussions, and some high-school football players not only have received concussions but even fatal injuries in the course of a football game. Just in very recent news there was a story of a high-school athlete who received brain injuries and another who became paralyzed from the neck down and died 11 years later—while still a young man.

(If I were a parent I would not want my kid to play football on any school team. I know, the argument on the other side is, "But they want to play." Well, it's notorious that teen-agers don't understand risk, and that is why they have a high rate of auto accidents.)

Last I want to mention car racing. Again I think the crowds of spectators hope to witness a crash. That might not be wishing to literally see blood but it's certainly bloodthirstiness in a less literal sense.

Update, January 24, 2012
Other sports, even skiing or skateboarding, can produce injuries. When or where these are made spectator sports (shown on TV or youtube), I wonder if people are hoping to see a wipeout.
Update, February 1, 2012
I don't really follow sports, but I just saw a news item that said that John Wesley Reed, a "cage fighter" (I confess I don't even know the terminology of some of the new sports) collapsed after a fight on TV and was taken away in an ambulance. According to the online article,

Nobody in in the mixed martial arts scene was prepared to acknowledge that he might have suffered serious trauma, instead blaming his condition on "fatigue and dehydration."

Copyright © 2012 by Richard Stein