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reason why people embrace each other as a group and the reason why people hate each other as a group are, methodologically speaking, identical: a specific picture people have in their minds, an image reflecting the reduced, shortened version of a complex reality. In Zygmunt Bauman's words (1993; especially 1–17), it is the quest for order that makes us think in simplified images, that creates simplistic pictures—because without prejudice, we would have to consider such an amount of complexity that life would become just too difficult.
Bauman sees the “quest for order” as a specific product of an ambivalence created by modernity. Modernity has sharpened the search for patterns to explain what is not understood. But it is the same tendency which can be seen in witch hunts of any kind before the dawn of modernity, before the impact Enlightenment had on society. The “construction of ideal types”—a significant aspect of rationalising about stereotypes (Young-Bruehl 1996, 386–411)—existed before modernity, as can be seen, for example, in the history of premodern anti-Semitism (Poliakov 1974). Stereotypes in the form of ideal types have always been instrumental in bringing a kind of order into a society so difficult to understand.
Of course, the inability to live with ambiguous realities is not evenly distributed. Education is an instrument that helps people to understand more of life's and society's complexities and makes it possible to keep social peace despite the existence of prejudices. Education helps reduce prejudices and potentially transforms negative prejudices into positive ones. But education will never erase prejudices completely.
There are prejudices and there are prejudices: a prejudice focused on the assumption that a certain group of people consists of parasites which have to be exterminated for the common good is very different, in terms of murderous intensity, from the assumption that a specific group of people has a special talent for music and entertainment but not for hard work. Sexists declare women inferior by nature and therefore not capable of any important social function in the public sphere, beyond the private sphere reserved for them. But this is rather different from the perception that women are less talented in science and more in the humanities.