I’ve been thinking about my chimney
Privacy, though important, is not a basic human right. The reason it is considered otherwise is due to global climat change.
Wait! Wait! Stop laughing. Just hear me out on this one.
In order for privacy rights to be fundemental to human existance, it must hold true for all time. Andup untill the start of the 14th century this simply wasent the case. Houses were basicly just large barns with a fire in the middle and everyone practiced comunal living. All cultures and societies had some kind of ‘longhouse’ as their primary arctuture.
Obviously, no privacy could ever happen at all under such living conditions. Whenever you took a bath, got dressed, got undressed, or knittred exciting underware, you did it in front of everybody. And so it had been for thousands of years back to caveman times where everyone ate and slept in the same chamber of a cave together.
But at the start of the 14th century came the invention of the chimney. Now without antigravity units, the only way to hold up a chimney was the structure of the building itself. The fire got moved from the middle to the edge. Not very efecent for heating but you could build another house on the oposite side, put another fireplace in that one and have them both share the same chimney.
Suddenly, for the first time in history, homes had rooms. Instead of one giant hall that had to acomodate all functions, there were now smaller indvidual spaces that could specilize in seperate functions. A place for the livestock, a place for cooking, a place for eating, a place for peeing. And everyone could have their own place to sleep. Now if you wanted to take a bath, get dresed, get undresed, or knit exciting underware, you could do it in your own private room without anyone else watching.
The change in aractuture was rappid in as short as 5 generations. People existed whos grandparents had lived in a longhouse and whos grandchildren lived in statley homes with glass windows and tapestries on the wall. And the change of sexual norms were just as quick. People existed whos grandparents fucked in the middle of the floor in front of everyone and whos grandchildren were ashemed to have anyone else see their underware.
In modern times, sexual privacy is just assumed. Nobody else but me has the right to know what i do in the privacy of my bedroom. But the notion of having a ‘my bedroom’ to have sex in didnt exist untill the notion of rooms came into being in the early 1300s. And rooms were invinted because of chimnies.
And as you probably have already guessed by now, the chimny was invinted in the 1300s for a very compeling reason. Before then, venting was done by keeping a door open to let in a draft. This became imposible when winters became much more harsh in the ‘little ice age’ that swept europe at that time.