Simply because the humanities are often critical in their approach does not mean that they lead people to contest existing political arrangements. Many if not most of the greatest humanistic scholars of all time were enthusiastic advocates — precisely in the context of their scholarly work — of policies that we now regard as self-evidently abhorrent.
Similarly, we should not be misled by the superficial similarities between certain humanistic habits of thought and certain desirable moral dispositions. Humanistic methods of inquiry have no more inherent moral force than do the various methodologies of the natural sciences.
Nor is it prudent to construe the difference between the humanities and other intellectual disciplines that model themselves on the natural sciences as that between the “qualitative” and the “quantitative.” Every intellectual discipline works with empirical facts of some kind (quantitative), and every intellectual discipline relies on concepts and theories (qualitative). And even if we could somehow claim that the humanities had a monopoly on the qualitative aspect as compared to the “merely empirical” sciences, that still would not give us grounds for believing that the humanities are more meaningful and hence that the study of the humanities leads necessarily to a more meaningful life.