| Chapter Introduction: | Introduction to the Handbook on Prejudice |
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hidden behind values and taboos. It is not a tool for understanding the world, but a weapon in power and identity politics. This explains one characteristic of the prejudice: it is incorrigible. It can, on the contrary, be defined as a mental strategy to block the process of learning, which involves constant readjustments and reconstructions of preconceived ideas in the light of new experience and information. Instead of reconstructing the stereotype to accommodate the new evidence, the prejudice is reconstructed to push back and destroy evidence. While the stereotype is adapted to the world, prejudice adapts the world to itself. Prejudice—if held by those in power or supported by masses—can indeed shape others and the world according to its image and transform a phantasmic fiction into grim reality (Tajfel 1982, 96).
Prejudice differs clearly from stereotype in two ways: it is not open to development, but is fixed and unchangeable, and it is explicit and conscious rather than automatic and nonconscious. It is a judgment, a statement, a conviction in the shape of an argument; it is fiercely defended against critics and is tenaciously upheld in the face of contrary evidence. We may ask here, what is the difference between pre-judice and ideology? Ideology, it could be argued, is just another manifestation of prejudice in the shape of a more or less systematic or coherent worldview. Fascism and communism are ideologies built on and saturated with racial and social prejudices that justify genocide and democide. Capitalism, however, is also an ideology that creates social hierarchies and is built on the exploitation of the poor. Ecology is referred to by some as a scientific description of facts, by others as an ideology. If today the term ideology has gone more or less out of use, this has happened because it is generally used as a polemical rather than a descriptive tool, employed to denounce a group and its worldview as false or treacherous. Ideology is always what the others think and never a description of one's own point of view. When Sacvan Bercovitch used it in the 1980s, he was careful to choose a purely descriptive definition of the term: