1) I do appreciate your continued belief that the digital is an important domain for the 21st century humanities. That is my intuition as well (not surprising, perhaps, since, I’m trying to work through the question in a blog comment).

2) I understand why you were inclined to bracket out the culture war, but I think this description is missing the importance of politics. Take, for example, the arguments made about inequality in a book like The Spirit Level. I find it convincing that a key insight of the humanities is that people are affected by relative as well as absolute resources available to them. That’s an inherently political belief.

3) That said, it’s tempting to tilt the scales, and to classify, more or less, everything that’s good in life as “humane” and defining the opposing point of view as, “anti-humane” pushes in that direction. I would think that it’s worth identifying the issues in which the ideal outcome requires a dialectic between the humane and it’s opponents.

4) It also feels like what you’ve written edges in the direction of identifying the humane with decentralized [knowledge/decision making /culture] and the anti-humane as the forces of centralization / standardization / Taylorization. That seems like an easy mind-set to fall into, but it also puts the humanities in the position of, “[standing] athwart history, yelling Stop.” Is there a way to articulate the idea that it is humane to automate whatever can be automated without doing a disservice to human experience, and to know when to limit automation?

As is clear, I don’t disagree with the position you’ve taken, I just want to feel around and try to figure out where the edges are — and what happens at those edges.

Would you take ‘humane’ in this context to be a synonym for ‘anti-reductive’? Or a neighbor, perhaps?