It seems that, if we retain pretensions to seriousness, we should be alarmed or outraged to learn that young people tend to vote in elections on the basis of good looks.
Research published at UCC last week, it appears, confirms that elections are fast turning into beauty contests. A survey conducted among 650 voters in three Cork polling stations during the June elections suggested that, when the ballot paper has photographs of the candidates, women tend to vote for young, good-looking males, and men for good-looking women.
The faces on the mock papers were of candidates from outside the Cork constituency, and so unknown to the voters. They were actually the faces of candidates running in a Dublin constituency, and subsequently there was found to be a high degree of conformity between the survey results and how these candidates fared in the real poll. The subtext of the story, one supposes, has to do with some element of perceived degeneration in the public perception of the gravity of politics. The implication of our implied disapproval of this allegedly new trend is that it demotes qualities such as experience and wisdom in favour of a superficial judgment on the basis of appearance. (The survey found that older candidates fared worst.)
I'm not so sure this is such a great problem. Since all political parties nowadays ensure that their elected personnel are virtual prisoners of the party whip, does it really matter whether individual politicians are wise or experienced? And since all politicians nowadays sell themselves on the basis of posters containing a mugshot and a meaningless slogan, is it not a little disingenuous to tut-tut when voters respond in the predictable way? During the recent election campaign, the average streetscape took on the appearance of a massive open-air dating agency, as the various suitors for our civic affections sought to put their case, not on the basic form or content but on what might be called the eye-candy principle of democracy.
All this survey really tells us is that politics, too, falls under the sway of biology. Since the power of biology is taken for granted in the disco and on the sportsfield, why not in the chambers of parliament? As men and women we seek as mates the most beautiful we can win. In that, the cruellest arena, aesthetic and form are intertwined, as we each instinctively seek the enhanced vitality of the human gene. Why should politics not answer to the same pulse?
By implication, we claim to consider beauty to be intellectually, if not morally, suspect, an idea that reveals its cracks when you consider that virtually any conventional image of Jesus might have been approved by Louis Walsh. Beauty is essentially a matter of balance, proportion and harmony - all qualities profoundly connected to the mission of politics, which can be summarised as an attempt to make the world more beautiful. Why, then, should we not require our politicians to themselves be beautiful? And where is the evidence that grey hair or crow's feet are better guarantees of political ability than clear skin or white teeth?
If all other things are equal, it seems reasonable to vote for someone because we find them attractive. In the recent election, I confess, confronted by a range of candidates, indistinguishable by policy or achievement, I gave my Number One to the best-looking female and worked down the line. This was a departure from my usual local elections practice of beginning at the bottom, with the most objectionable candidate, and working backwards, often encountering considerable surprise on discovering the identity of my first preference. This new, positive strategy has the advantage of completely overriding party-political preferences/prejudices, as demonstrated by the fact that my first preference was for a PD! As it happens, the woman in question had, in her election material, pledged to remove the grotesque public sculpture on the Pavilion corner in Dún Laoghaire, which merely confirms the relationship between beauty and politics. Beauty is as beauty does.
When I confessed my new methodology to two (male) neighbours who were standing watching me paint my house (why do we decide that a well-painted house is a moral statement, whereas human good-looks have no moral value?) I knew from their guffaws of laughter that they had, on occasion, done the same. Laughter is really a release mechanism which trips when someone speaks a truth everyone has been avoiding for ages. We think we are alone in our foibles and flippancies, and then, as Patrick Kavanagh observed, someone blabs and we cannot control our relief.
Maybe it's not such a calamity, after all, if our politicians, at least, are going to get less ugly. Naomi Wolf, perhaps luxuriating in the knowledge that she was herself among the most beautiful of women, pronounced that beauty was a social construct, a currency system like the gold standard, a spurious aesthetic invented by politicians for the purposes of upholding the patriarchy. If this is true, then at least the arbitrary aesthetic is catching up on its creators.