Isn't that perfectly reasonable? If you have the means to study as a hobby, then you should be able to enjoy that. If you haven't yet got the means for that, then earn it and maybe your children can do an arts degree off the back of your engineer's salary or you can do it yourself when you retire. The whole point of the government subsidizing education is to create useful workers that give more back to society with their useful work. Not to indulge people's pseudo-intellectual pleasures.
It's not as if arts degrees make people somehow superior at understanding society and arts and culture. Those are things anybody can pick up even with no formal education. Understanding the scientific method, statistics and critical thinking would go further in making well rounded useful thinkers than knowing what some ancient person's opinion about his local society was or training to become an activist who refuses to allow themselves to think objectively.