Labels such as ‘‘the culture wars,’’ ‘‘the science wars,’’ or ‘‘the Freud wars’’ are now widely used to refer to some of the disagreements thatplague contemporary intellectual life ... But I would like to register a gentle protest. Metaphors influence the mind in many unnoticed ways. The willingness to describe fierce disagreement in terms of the metaphors of war makes the very existence of real wars seem more natural, more inevitable,more a part of the human condition. It also betrays us into an insensibility toward the very idea of war, so that we are less prone to be aware of how totally disgusting real wars really are.

[I]t was really only in the generation or two before hers that the idea had started to traverse the spectrum of likelihood in the popular imagination, beginning at unthinkable, progressing to absurd, then going from possible but unlikely to probable and likely, before eventually arriving – round about the time of her birth – at seemingly inevitable.