The current state of political crisis coincides with a historic high in engagement with the humanities, *including* from STEM people. If anything, political sophistication has drawn people away from a naive faith in democracy, on the right and left.
And yet humanist expertise feels devalued relative to quantitive STEM expertise, as part of the maturation of neoliberal technocracy
And you shouldn’t assume returning the humanities would move the culture leftward either. Look at all the shit Jesse Singal gets on Twitter, and a lot of it is he takes a humanist approach to the recent prominence of gender transition – he identifies it as a cultural phenomenon, with influences and origins and addressable as such by anyone who cares about human culture; he at least implicitly raises questions of what a human is or should be; critically he sees the apparatus of STEM-style sexuality experts as a cultural and not natural phenomenon
Because that apparatus is committed to no-gatekeeping yay-trans (and increasingly seeking to openly maintain itself as such in ways not explained by its own legitimating narrative) and they being the only “real”, legitimate experts helps translate that into policy and people want to defend that.
Like that’s what the debate over homosexuality in the 20th century was - quantitative sexologists would cite studies and surveys and then ministers and psychologists - postgrad-credentialed humanist experts - would push back with arguments from first principles over what humans Are and Are For and the whole thing was a wash.
(Even within gender-scholar quarters the humanist theorists asking if the rectum must be a grave have been eclipsed. I guess there’s Kate Manne doing feminism-as-philosophy, but the obsolete thing about Paglia isn’t her politics, it’s who would consider a Nietzschean exploration of the Western Canon a useful approach to anything these post-Theory days?)
