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COMMENT | Sometimes, in the drama of events that threaten to sweep all before it, a book or article appears that may have an effect that represents a momentary stay against confusion.

This may be what Johor Permaisuri Raja Zarith Sofia's post the other day on her personal Facebook profile had when she recalled, by name, a slew of individuals who had rendered service that was above and beyond the call of duty to the royals, in times of members' illness and in good health.

It was a touching remembrance and at a needed time, too.

The post came just when strident rhetoric was heightening racial tensions in the country, a process that is usually accompanied by the tendency of inciters to lump their targets into an undifferentiated mass.

This indifferentiation makes the stirring up of hatred easier.

When inciters herd the targets of their wrath together, into an undifferentiated mass, they make it easier to ratchet up hatred by one group against the targeted other.

This is just what the Johor Permaisuri, now quite renowned as an opinion maker of moderate counsel, sought to counter with her posting on those individuals – she names each one – and the service they had given her family, which she gratefully acknowledged.

Humane antidote

The act of naming each one of the providers of care and service – this gesture of individuation – is a humane antidote to the impulse to lump and herd together people whom inciters of hatred have elected to target.

Individuals, conscious of their identities as autonomous selves, are less apt to lose themselves in mob action than groups that have been stirred to hate an amorphous other.

A powerful depiction of the humanising effect of individuation could be seen in To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, the novel that was the 20th century's most poignant indictment of racism.

Told from the perspective of an adolescent daughter of a lawyer who defends a black man in a rape case of a white woman, the novel had an episode at the end where an enraged mob assembles to vent their anger against Atticus Finch, counsel of the accused.

The daughter, in her innocence, picks out by name individual members of the mob whom she had known as neighbours and friends of the rural community in which her father plies his trade.

This individuation prompts an attack of conscience in the named ones as they peel off from the mob and slink off in shame, unable to abide the sense of diminished responsibility they felt as members of a mob.

Raja Zarith, who enjoys a considerable following on social media and in print, has deployed a perspective-shedding, tension-defusing remembrance by singing the praises of the named individuals who happen to belong to an ethnic group that's at present being targeted by rabid spokespersons of supposedly threatened other groups.

She has done this before, using her columns in a national newspaper and through Facebook posts, to bring moral suasion to bear on febrile issues roiling the public arena.

Multiple faiths

These forays, amid the screeching and bellowing of the stridents, remind Malaysians old enough to remember her father, Sultan Idris of Perak, that he was a ruler who was apt to take note and pay due regard to the multiple faiths and ethnicities of his subjects.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that he fairly revelled in this awareness of his subjects' racial and religious diversity.

Raja Zarith, by the consistency of her espousal of the good of this diversity, has given a nice twist to the poet William Wordsworth's observation, in a lilting poem of his, that The Child is Father of the Man.

No doubt, both father and daughter, in their individual experiences, must have elated at the diversity of the peoples around and about them.

Raja Zarith has in the past alluded to her father's encouragement that she allows that diversity to enhance her.

The Johor Permaisuri is now deploying that enlargement as a balm for a troubled polity.


TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for more than four decades. A sobering discovery has been that those who protest the loudest tend to replicate the faults they revile in others.

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of Malaysiakini.

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