Robert Bickers, a superb (and superbly readable) historian of the British Empire in China, recently gave an interview to the Shanghaiist website about his newest book. That book—Getting Stuck In for Shanghai—tells the story of a group of British expatriates who sailed from Shanghai to England to join the army at the beginning of World War I, and if you want to learn more about it, you should read the interview. What especially caught my eye, though, was an exchange that pointed toward a more general topic:
I’m interested in the ways in which the Shanghai of the era you write about is similar to the Shanghai of today. Just like then, there is a large foreign expat community in Shanghai today, who are able to lead a social life that is very different from that of the Chinese in the city. Do you see any parallels? How are the foreigners living in Shanghai today similar or different from the ones in the 1910s?
There are plenty of superficial parallels to spot, but the underlying relationship is very different of course: foreign expats are subject to Chinese law, unlike their predecessors; and there are no French, or American or British gun boats moored in the Huangpu. That difference actually should make us think a little differently about the old world of Shanghai’s foreign communities: if we strip away all of the things that seem to be similar, what remains? That is the sort of question which interests the historians.
The ability to see—and to articulate—similarities and differences is so basically human it can be easy to take for granted. But precisely because this ability is so basically human—and, incidentally, because it can be so useful—it deserves attention. To mangle Chesterton, “If a thing is impossible not to do, it is worth doing better.” At the least, it is worth understanding better.
Aristotle, following Plato, appreciated the power and importance of our capacity for comparison and contrast. He taught that classifying and defining the things in the world is a necessary step toward understanding them. In broad terms (that I invite any Aristotelians or Thomists to correct in the comment section below), Aristotelian definitions include at least two parts. The first part involves comparison; the second, contrast. As Robin Smith puts it in the article “Aristotle’s Logic” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
A species is defined by giving its genus [. . .] and its differentia [. . .]: the genus is the kind under which the species falls, and the differentia tells what characterizes the species within that genus. As an example, human might be defined as animal (the genus) having the capacity to reason (the differentia).
We do something like this, with a little less philosophical or scientific rigor, multiple times per day: Not only the journalist who compares Shanghai in 1914 and 2014, or the historian who hunts for the telling contrasts, but also the athlete practicing until the right technique becomes second nature; the lawyer analyzing helpful and harmful precedents; and the grocery shopper thumping produce, are all checking things or events against each other, alert to the similarities and differences between them.
So, too, are engaged patrons of any art (and serious consumers of any form of entertainment!), who often (and, often, reflexively) compare and contrast—at the levels of deep themes and of surface details alike—the works they have taken in.
At his long-running blog Disputations, Tom Kreitzberg shows what can happen when an attentive reader of Scripture applies his natural ability for analogy and distinction to the inspired text. Mr. Kreitzberg considers the Gospel reading for this past Sunday (Roman Rite, Ordinary Form), the story of Jesus exorcizing the Caananite woman’s daughter, alongside the story of Jesus healing the centurion’s servant. Rather than try to “strip away” the stories’ similarities (the better to apprehend the differences between them), Kreitzberg here lines up the similarities between the two stories in order to “abstract out” a common insight they contain.†
Whether our thoughts are on matters sacred or profane, our minds can’t help but turn them into matter for comparisons and contrasts, analogies and distinctions. The sacred and the profane have that much, at least, in common.
* Prof. Bickers’ Shanghaiist interviewer, Yining Su, also interviewed Catholic cartoonist Gene Luen Yang about Yang’s recent–and heavily Catholic–graphic novel, Boxers and Saints. An earlier Yang book, The Eternal Smile: Three Stories, received a very positive review in the Mary Queen of Angels 2010 issue of Dappled Things.
†Hot prayer tip: Exploring analogies and distinctions among the various Mysteries can be an excellent method for meditating on the Rosary.
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John P. Liêm is a Lay Dominican with a J.D. that he tries to use for good, not evil.