Comparison: an old and reliable enlightenment tool. The philosophes loved the whole idea of comparison, for it seemed to magically produce progress in ideas. Ride the comparison into the modern was a kind of program. See, for instance, how the savages in America had myths and practices startlingly like the ancient Greeks. Ask yourself if progress hadn't made the contemporary European (which consisted of a handful of European bourgois urban intellectuals and forgot the peasant and artisan masses) the crown of civilization.
Unfortunately, comparison, as the elementary student of dialectics knows, simply fossilizes the embryo idea – leaving it forever in a pre-natal state unless it is vigorously moved forward via the forceps of antithesis and inversion. Thus, the revelatory smack of Diderot's The Nephew of Rameau.
However, under the shadow of that dialectic move, comparison still holds a great deal of anarchic power – satirical power. The enlightenment prehended the limits and fate of comparison in the preference given to satire. Gullivers travels is the satiric odyssey of civilization - a predecessor of Adorno and Horkheimer's The Dialectic of the Enlightenment, but one stripped of pathos.
The expression you can't compare x to y is inherently reactionary, supposing a natural and forbidding hierarchy. You can compare the lillies of the field to Solomon, or to an extermination camp. You can compare my digestion to the big bang.
Comparison is free. It is an existential property of the universe. It is impossible to imagine comparison without the universe - and vice versa. A universe without comparisons is not thiinkable by the monkey we are - or even thinkable.
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