Ralph Ellison’s Technological Humanism

Abstract

Ralph Ellison emerged onto the literary scene as the concept of human rights was being formulated on the political one. He began crafting Invisible Man (1952) in 1945, four years after Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave his “Four Freedoms” State of the Union address to Congress. The “essential human freedoms” that Roosevelt hoped to instill across the world included freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear—lofty international ambitions for a country that regularly denied these freedoms to its African American citizens. For Roosevelt and many Americans, these ideals were closely associated with the abstract notion of “technological progress.” In fact, the “Four Freedoms” address listed “[t]he enjoyment of the fruits of scientific progress” alongside “the preservation of civil liberties for all” as parallel values that Americans demand from their government. Roosevelt’s faith in the “fruits of scientific progress” echoed a gradual shift in American political thought. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, politicians began to portray science-based technological production as an end in itself rather than as a means to facilitate social change. Leo Marx and Merritt Roe Smith characterize this “technological determinism” as the process by which “a complex event is made to seem the inescapable yet strikingly plausible result of a technological innovation” (xi). In the context of this influential ideology, President Roosevelt could promise that government-sponsored initiatives such as the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Rural Electrification Administration would improve every American’s life, and thousands would believe him. While many Americans invested in the hope that technological development would beget social progress, the international community began to elaborate on the concept of human rights more rigorously. On 23 October 1947, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) sent W. E. B. Du Bois’s An Appeal to the World to the United Nations (UN). Subtitled A Statement on the Denial of Human Rights to Minorities in the Case of Citizens of Negro Descent in the United States of America and an Appeal to the United Nations for Redress, this document raised international alarm about human rights abuses against African American citizens. In 1948, the UN expanded Roosevelt’s