In The City We Became, the antagonist, the Woman in White, uses utilitarianism—the ethical philosophy that one should seek the greatest good for the greatest number—to justify evil deeds. Meanwhile, the protagonists sometimes justify their ethically dubious preferences by appealing to nature and the natural instinct to survive—but, at other times, they argue that their ethical obligations to save others’ lives should override survival instincts. The Women in White’s dubious self-justifications and the protagonists’ inconsistency suggest that both utilitarianism and natural instincts are inadequate guides to ethical behavior. In the novel, humans’ reality exists in a “multiverse” of parallel dimensions. Great cities are living things that choose a human avatar to represent them at their birth; unfortunately, city’s births also puncture the boundaries between dimensions, destroying the dimensions bordering humanity’s. The Woman in White is an alien from another dimension who seeks to destroy cities and, eventually, humanity’s reality altogether. She believes her cause is just, because cities kill more intelligent lives in other dimensions than exist in humanity’s dimension—yet she uses evil tactics, such as exploiting human racism and illicitly influencing humans’ behavior by infecting them with mysterious tendrils. Readers may sympathize with her ends—saving more lives than she destroys—yet by illustrating how repulsive her means are, the novel suggests that there is something very wrong with her ethical reasoning.
Meanwhile, the novel’s protagonists, human avatars representing New York City’s boroughs, are horrified to discover that the city’s birth destroyed entire dimensions—but the Bronx’s avatar Bronca quickly convinces Brooklyn’s avatar Brooklyn, Manhattan’s avatar Manny, and Queens’s avatar Padmini that it’s as natural for parallel dimensions to die so cities can live as it is for humans to eat meat. The boroughs resume their quest to defeat the Woman in White despite knowing that cities’ births kill myriad intelligent lives. Yet when Bronca, Brooklyn, Manny, and Padmini come to believe they’ll have to sacrifice their own lives to save humanity, they decide that it makes sense to sacrifice four to save billions—a decision that dismisses natural survival instincts and replicates the Woman in White’s utilitarian logic, while ignoring that the same logic would require them to sacrifice billions of humans to save billions of billions more lives in parallel dimensions. Read carefully, then, the novel suggests that neither its antagonist nor its protagonists yet have an adequate ethical outlook.
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Ethics and Nature Quotes in The City We Became
“But seriously, thanks for helping me. You hear all kinds of stuff about how rude New Yorkers are, but . . . thanks.”
“Eh, we’re only assholes to people who are assholes first,” she says, but she smiles as she says it.
The tendril mass looms, ethereal and pale, more frightening as the cab accelerates. There is a beauty to it, he must admit—like some haunting, bioluminescent deep-sea organism dragged to the surface. It is an alien beauty, however, meant for some other environment, some other aether, and here in New York its presence is a contaminant. The very air around it has turned gray, and now that they’re closer, he can hear the air hissing as if the tendrils are somehow hurting the molecules of nitrogen and oxygen they touch. Manny’s been in New York for less than an hour and yet he knows, he knows, that cities are organic, dynamic systems. They are built to incorporate newness. But some new things become part of a city, helping it grow and strengthen—while some new things can tear it apart.
I am Manhattan, he thinks again, this time in a slow upwelling of despair. Every murderer. Every slave broker. Every slumlord who shut off the heat and froze children to death. Every stockbroker who got rich off war and suffering.
It’s only the truth. He doesn’t have to like it, though.
“Just getting sick of these immigrants,” he says. He’s always careful to use acceptable words when he’s on the job, rather than the words he says at home. That’s how cops mess up, he has explained to her. They don’t know how to keep home words at home and work words at work.
So when she’d seen this man step out of the crumbling entryway of an old building shell, with a smirk on his lips and his hand prominently resting on the handle of his gun, she’d felt like she does now, fiftyish years later in an art center bathroom. She’d felt bigger. Beyond fear or anger. She’d gone to the doorway, of course. Then she grabbed its sides to brace herself, and kicked in his knee. He’d spent three months in traction, claiming he’d slipped on a brick, and never messed with her again. Six years later, having bought her own pair of steel-toed boots, Bronca had done the same thing to a police informant at Stonewall—another time she’d been part of something bigger.
Bigger. As big as the whole goddamn borough.
That was what had made the paint-figures so creepy, really. To know that the things she was seeing weren’t just mindless, swirl-faced monsters, but things with minds and feelings? Minds as incomprehensibly alien as Lovecraft once imagined his fellow human beings to be.
“I keep thinking about how, at the park, she kept switching between ‘we’ and ‘I’ like the pronouns were interchangeable. Like she couldn’t keep the words straight, and they didn’t really matter anyway.”
“Maybe this isn’t her first language.”
That’s partly it. But Manny suspects the problem is less linguistic than contextual. She doesn’t get English because English draws a distinction between the individual self and the collective plural, and wherever she comes from, whatever she is, that difference doesn’t mean the same thing. If there’s a difference at all.
I’m his, he thinks suddenly, wildly. I want to be . . . oh, God, I want to be his. I live for him and will die for him if he requires it, and oh yes, I’ll kill for him, too, he needs that, and so for him and him alone I will be again the monster that I am—
“Not sure I love New York enough to die for it. Definitely don’t love it enough to sacrifice my family for it.”
[…]
“Anything I can do to help your family, I will.”
Her expression softens. Maybe she likes him a little more. “And I hope you get to become the person you actually want to be,” she says, which makes him blink. “This city will eat you alive, you know, if you let it. Don’t.”
[T]he modified brownstone has been shorn of the stoop that once connected it to the neighborhood. This amputation is a still-healing wound that makes the building even more susceptible to attack by foreign organisms.
“Nothing human beings do is set in stone—and even stone changes, anyway. We can change, too, anything about ourselves that we want to. We just have to want to.” She shrugs. “People who say change is impossible are usually pretty happy with things just as they are.”
“I know it I know it I know . . . made me for this, but am I not a good creation?” Gasp. Sob. Now the voice hitches. “I . . . I know. I see h-h-how hideous I am. But it isn’t my fault. The particles of this universe are perverse—” There’s a long pause this time. Bronca has almost reached the ground level when the voice chokes out, now thick with bitterness, “I am only what you made me.”
Everything that happens everywhere else happens on Staten Island, too, but here people try not to see the indecencies, the domestic violence, the drug use. And then, having denied what’s right in front of their eyes, they tell themselves that at least they’re living in a good place full of good people. At least it’s not the city.
[…]
Evil comes from elsewhere, Matthew Houlihan believes. Evil is other people. She will leave him this illusion, mostly because she envies his ability to keep finding comfort in simple, black-and-white views of the world. Aislyn’s ability to do the same is rapidly eroding.
“Okay, so.” Brooklyn visibly braces herself. “So what happens to those universes that our city punches through?”
[…]
“They die,” Bronca says. She’s decided to be compassionate about it, but relentless. None of them can afford sentimentality. “The punching-through? It’s a mortal wound, and that universe folds out of existence. Every time a city is born—no, really, before that. The process of our creation, what makes us alive, is the deaths of hundreds or thousands of other closely related universes, and every living thing in them.”
Brooklyn shuts her eyes for a moment. “Oh my God,” Queens breaths. “Oh my God. We’re all mass murderers.”
[…]
[Manny] takes [Padmini’s] shaking hands in his own, and looks her in the eye, and says, “Would you prefer to offer up all of your family and friends to die instead? Maybe there’s a way we can.”
“Millions of lives in exchange for four?” She shrugs. It looks nonchalant but isn’t. “That ain’t even a debate.”
