I responded the way I did because, being sympathetic to anarchism and knowing that the modern nation-state did not arise until medieval times, with some activists I often run up against a frustrating Garden of Eden-like notion that all was well once, and if only it could be that way again we'd be better off. (I'm not saying Charles explicitly made a Garden of Eden claim, I'm just riffing here on some ideas.)
There's Rousseau's noble savage and there is also Thomas Hobbess' "man is wolf to man." The truth may be somewhere in between, but possibly more likely the latter, only Hobbes' Leviathan state did not cure man's wolfishness -- if anything, it magnified it into World Wars 1 and 2 and now possibly nuclear Armageddon, not to mention other wolfishness like Abu Ghraib. Of course, humans also have tremendous capacity to do great, humanitarian, positive things -- but like Thucydides said, "The strong do as they can while the weak suffer what they must."
It's true humans have not always lived in nation-states, and they may not live in them in the future. Bakunin said nation-states were transitory, historic passing forms, "like the Church, of which it is a younger brother." But almost any social organization is a passing form and is in a constant state of flux: the family, the polity, culture at large, etc.
Before the nation-state, depending on what culture or region we're talking about -- or even more troublesome, what time period among tens of thousands of years we're talking about -- there might have been clans that lived under excruciating conditions as Woj mentions, ruled by superstitious dogma that assigned various ranks and positions to people in the clan based on what the spirits or ghosts of forefathers wanted, or they might have been placid, peaceful farmers hoping neighboring hordes wouldn't wipe them out any time soon and raid their crops. Or they might have even been matrilineal, like Brown says, with some degree of community democracy. But there was not a global type of society that was uniform everywhere across the planet in an ancient time. Different tribes or social units had different ways of organizing themselves. If I'm not mistaken, nearly all were deeply superstitious (so far as we know) -- and no atheist likes societies ruled by superstition, do they?
I do agree, I think, with Brown's point that the transition from hunter-gatherer or scavenger communities in the Middle and Neart East several millenia ago gave rise in that particular place and time to what would eventually become today's nation-states, through outward expansion -- but I don't think there is evidence for a primordial global matriarchy. Even if it is ideologically appealing.
In any event, regardless of the past, we know what we need for the future: full workplace democracy, where people are not penalized or privileged based on the body they happen to be born into, and where folks have full self-determination over their working or non-working lives. An overthrow of capitalism and the illegitimate authoritarianism of the state, which acts as capitalism's taxpayer-financed Pinkerton thug, is what we need.
-B.
Wojtek wrote:
"I fully agree. The myths of idyllic bucolic societies of the past are just that - myths. AFIK, the indirect archaeological evidence suggests the contrary: harsh, brutal and miserable living conditions, disease, short life span, infanticide, inequality. It is possible to infer the existence of inequality from the analysis of the bone structure, which in turn reflects dietary intake."
I wrote:
"Pre-literate peoples left no written records of how they lived, so we have no direct evidence what social formations they arranged themselves in or what they thought about them. It's tempting to posit a composite, catch-all "ancient society" and project stuff onto that from our own ideological biases, but I suspect that there were in fact various societies, spread across vast geographic distances, in 'ancient times' -- and that each had particular social arrangements or modes of governance they preferred."