In our silicon age of technology where money, power, fame and respect go to quantifiers, can anything be said for the lowly, ill paid, unmonetizable humanities, or even for science not practiced in pursuit of corporate or state interests?

Well, perhaps. They can teach us how to be human, instead of inhumane. I might go so far as to say literature, history and science can teach us almost everything worth knowing except how to make a gazillion-dollar app or distort markets to enrich oneself through flash-boy wiles.

I am currently reading James Shapiro’s “The Year of Lear” which describes 1606 when Shakespeare and his players first mounted “King Lear,” “Macbeth,” and “Antony and Cleopatra,” a time when the new King James I was trying to consolidate power.

Then, as now, as Shapiro says, the world was filled with “violence, deception and hypocrisy,” not to mention greed, injustice and egomania. He quotes Lear late in the play, a sadder and wiser monarch noting that the self-righteous beadle who lashes the whore secretly lusts after her himself, and the usurious moneylender seeks to hang the petty thief.

Then, as now, “through tattered robes small vices do appear;/ Robes and furred gowns hide all.” That is, the poor man driven by want to steal a crust of bread is easily condemned to prison. White collar crooks armored in bespoke suits and corporate attorneys steal millions and never see the inside of a courtroom.

In the same volume, Shapiro discusses the subject of witchcraft which was current news in 1606. A few years earlier, several witches had been executed in Scotland and King James had developed an interest in the subject and had helped expose a con game in which a woman pretended to be possessed as a kind of sideshow attraction.

The issue of whether skepticism was warranted was in the air. Was there a natural explanation for all phenomena or did the supernatural rule our lives? Shapiro tells us one ecclesiastic of that era warned against “the dangerous implications of such skepticism.” He said succinctly, “No devils, no God.”

This is familiar logic. If there’s a natural, scientific explanation for everything, who needs to posit God? Indeed, by this logic the church has a compelling interest in insisting on the existence or demons and evil incarnate. They help keep the institution in business.

The same logic is everywhere. If Robber Barons didn’t exist, communists would have to invent them. And vice versa. To justify German military failure and the need for a rearmed, anti-democratic, totalitarian Third Reich, the bogeyman of a conspiring Jewish enemy within was essential. If climate change is a hoax, then the fossil fuel industry can drill, baby, drill. Could it be that our economic and educational systems are failing, or do our employment troubles stem from illegal immigrants and unfair Asian competitors? And of course, no terrorists under every bed, no need for a bloated defense budget or the abridgement of civil liberties.

Shakespeare, that shrewd, humane, curious, many-sided genius, devoted his career to showing the comic folly and tragic horror that could come from superstition, misapprehension, jumping to conclusion, allowing passions to overwhelm reason.

Macbeth hears what he wants to hear in the weird sisters’ prophecies and discovers too late he has been led fatally astray by this misreading. Othello mistakes his true wife for false. Lear mistakes the daughter who loves him best for one who loves him least. Everywhere in the plays, foolish mortals fail to see the truth before their eyes.

More than once Shakespeare warns against blaming one’s fate on hocus pocus, malign forces or the supposed villains we scapegoat. We mistake enemies for friends and the reverse. We are taken in by glib liars and never hear the warnings of sober-sided counselors.

“The fault, Dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves,” he has Cassius say in “Julius Caesar.” And Edmund in “Lear” says much the same. “When we are sick in fortune — often the surfeit of our own behavior— we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon and the stars.”

Good, solid common sense in each case, but such is Shakespeare’s knowledge of both human nature and dramaturgy that the characters offering this wisdom are evil-doers trying to manipulate their hearers. As they say, the devil can quote scripture, or logic or science, for his own purposes. So one must not just be able to evaluate with cool rationality the validity of what’s being said, but the reliability and motives of the speaker.

It is entirely apropos that a Shakespearean-sized character recently said, “I love the poorly educated.” They’re so easy to delude. If there’s ever a good time to brush up your Shakespeare, to take a refresher course in logic and logical fallacies, to sharpen your knowledge of Occam’s razor, to depend on the scientific method, to test hypotheses before believing, it’s during an American political campaign. If we fall for the siren song of the demagogue, the fault is not in our stars.