Anarchy in the FT!

Ok ok, the title is a little disingenuous.

But on the stepper at t'gym, I encountered in the space of 10 minutes (or 200 calories), two snippets of interest to armchair beardies (ABs) like me.

In the FT Magazine for Feb 14/15 Anna Brooke does an interview with a Parisian sewer cleaner called Jose Lahaye. He talks about the vicissitudes of the job, and closes out with “Being a sewer man may be dangerous and dirty, but you receive a lot of praise and respect from both the public and the government, and that makes it all worthwhile.”

Which is what the ABs have argued in response to the puerile “well, if there was anarchy, nobody would do the unpleasant jobs” line. As if people who do unpleasant jobs are only motivated by money, or the threat of a bullet.

Later on in the same issue, the brilliant Matthew Engel (his piece on banking in Liechtenstein was fab) visits Summerhill, the (in)famous school Where the Kids Make the Rules..

“It is an illusion that Summerhill has no rules: Neill made a firm distinction between allowing children their own freedom and allowing them to interfere with anyone else's There probably isn't a school in the country with a thicker rule book.... It'sa also an illusion that kids dislike rules. They actually love applying them. They just resent the imposition of them by adults.”

Engel is not starry-eyed of course.

“It would be nice to believe that the absence of pressure to achieve perversely instils a thirst for knowledge and learning, but I saw no evidence of that.... Neil said: 'I would rather Summerhill produced a happy street sweeper than a neurotic prime minister.' But doesn't happiness come from fulfilment? Wouldn't a street sweeper who might have been PM be really neurotic.”

I've long noted that the Life and Arts section of the weekend FT takes artists/writers/film-makers etc who are anarchists and communists seriously, and manages to mention their political beliefs and actions without the standard sneer/smear/patronising chuckle of the Guardian etc. It's (yet another) reason to read the FT, as if all the others weren't enough.