Horace went on, in this culminating Ode:

I shall not wholly die: large residue
Shall ’scape the queen of funerals. Ever new
My after fame shall grow, while pontiffs climb
With silent maids the Capitolian height.

Yes, great ideas and great art live on beyond their maker. Indeed, such work grows ‘in the esteem of future generations’, ‘postera crescam laude’, as the University of Melbourne’s motto proclaims as its bold, what we might now call its ‘stretch target’. ‘Ever new / My after fame shall grow’.

Here is the conclusion of Horace’s tripping Ode:

‘Born,’ men will say, ‘where Aufidus is loud,
Where Daunus, scant of streams, beneath him bow’d
The rustic tribes, from dimness he wax’d bright,
First of his race to wed the Aeolian lay
To notes of Italy.’ Put glory on,
My own Melpomene, by genius won,
And crown me of thy grace with Delphic bay.

(trans. John Conington)

In 1957, when the University of Melbourne formulated its submission to Australia’s first inquiry into universities, headed by Sir Keith Murray, it recognised that it was not just another part of the community. Despite its strong professional training functions and (then) fairly tenuous grasp on research, it was ‘a place apart’ which sustained ‘the values of exact scholarship against the grain of a pioneer community’ (John Poynter and Carolyn Rasmussen, A Place Apart: The University of Melbourne: Decades of Challenge, 1996, quoting Alexander Boyce Gibson). Put another way, it had ‘sharpened the intellect and humanised the feelings’ of colonial society.

Here, between the university’s motto and an early statement of purpose, we have a formulation of education, humanity and philanthropy with origins in the ancient world: paideia, humanitas and philanthropia. Philanthropia (the Greek term) and humanitas (the Latin term) were two expressions of something similar: in one way or another, a love of, and respect for, humanity. Paideia (education) was the way by which such humanistic values were transmitted intergenerationally, more explicitly in the ancient world through training for liberty and nobility. Vice-Chancellor Sir David Derham furthered this statement of the primary obligation of the university to humanity when he wrote: ‘[a university’s] primary objective with respect to the pursuit of knowledge and the dissemination of knowledge arises from a commitment not to the local community, nor to the State, nor to the nation but to the world’ (D.P. Derham, ‘Universities, Governments, and the Assumption of Federal Responsibility for Higher Education in Australia’, The Australian University, vol. 13, 1975). This is a sentiment which we might now express in two ways, through the international community of scholars, and through education of our students in ‘global citizenship’.

Of course, when Derham expressed that connection between knowledge and ‘a commitment ... to the world’, he expressed something rather hard to measure, indeed impossible to account for in any precise way. A university needed to be ‘a place apart’, the very title of John Poynter and Carolyn Rasmussen’s excellent history of the university. Despite the reality of much professional training – providing the doctors, lawyers, accountants and engineers of a growing state – the expression of Derham’s values was globally aspirational, even exhortatory. More practically (he was a vice-chancellor, after all), Derham was seeking to fend off the increasingly specific demands of state and federal governments and the increasing regulatory hold of the professions. You could say that he saw the price of surrendering ‘the priceless’ – that inculcation of uncostable values in future generations of graduates, through whom the esteem of the university would need to grow if it were to be true to its Horatian motto. Yes, even in 1853, the university’s forefathers had realised that a vital asset of a university is its accrual of scholarly esteem.

It seems appropriate to me that it is the University of Melbourne, of all Australian institutions, that has so successfully launched ‘the Melbourne model’ of undergraduate education. Its aim is global, and its intentions – if I understand them properly – are essentially humanistic, balancing disciplinary depth and breadth of understanding. This curriculum recognises the student as needing to become a well-informed citizen of various communities. Whether this is done through great books courses – the most traditional humanities-based way of ensuring thoughtful breadth – or the ‘great issues’ courses of increasing popularity in the last decade, or through careful control of the curricular diet to ensure a balance of ‘food groups’ – a more American approach – the goal is one of thoughtful, balanced, knowledgeable citizens who can cope with many levels of responsibility, through many careers and many challenges to world and self; graduates who, far from dwelling in ‘a place apart’, take their full place in the global, professional and social communities of our highly networked century.

The University of Melbourne is also bold because it flew in the face of the growingly impatient utilitarian values of a formulaic age, where immediate ‘return on investment’ is considered preferable to more patient rewards; an age that has emphasised immediate training for immediate employment needs – skilling – rather than recognising that such training, to be really effective, can only occur on top of the most inspiring general education. And I see here a keen recognition that education is not some game of maximising individual competitive advantage, but has strongly communal purposes – in supporting the public good, tolerance and compassion. This is a message that must gain a new hearing in the post-Enron, post-9/11, post-Lehman Brothers world.

Of course, Horace’s poetry, while surviving rather well for a couple of millennia, is not actually worth anything specific. Unlike Wal-Mart or the Commonwealth Bank, it has no specified value. It is, as Thucydides also hoped for his History of the Peloponnesian War, a ‘thing forever’.

Ours is an age in which the ‘priceless’ is often confused – because of its uncostability – with the ‘worthless’. How much is ethnic tolerance worth to a community, or historical understanding, or business trust? The best our economists can occasionally do is try to estimate the cost of not having such tolerance or understanding or trust. And the cost in each case is huge.

Even the ‘priceless’ has been commodified, by MasterCard no less (see www.priceless.com). Nothing, of course, could be more carefully priced than your MasterCard bill, including the price of the actual good, the transaction cost, the currency exchange, not to forget the accruing interest payments. It is worth looking, however, at what the ‘priceless.com’ campaign shows, because it is ultimately affirming of long-term, truly priceless values.

As MasterCard’s advertisements proclaim: ‘Seeing New York with a real New Yorker. Priceless’; ‘An extra day far, far away from the office. Priceless’; ‘Having fun. Priceless’. MasterCard’s website has categories of ‘pricelessness’, namely: ‘travel, food, sports, the arts, style, do-it-youself, well-being.’ MasterCard helpfully offers ‘priceless’ examples: a vacation, a hobby (such as art classes in Paris), the corner bakery. These examples culminate in that pinnacle of pricelessness: love.

In fact, we could summarise what thousands of participants in MasterCard’s Priceless campaign see as ‘priceless’: nature, beauty and culture. Priceless.com concludes: ‘There are some things money can’t buy. For everything else, there’s MasterCard.’ And, of course, MasterCard can help you by unlocking ‘the spending power to follow your passions’, from the modesty of MasterCard through World MasterCard to World Elite MasterCard, with their escalating freedoms of spending, repayment and debt.

I guess it is those ‘things money can’t buy’ that fall particularly, but not exclusively, in the province of the humanities: those moral goods, which have more to do with how people conduct themselves – the broad domain of ethics – than with the natural goods, which fall more in the domain of economics. I refer to the study of what people say (language and literature), think (philosophy), believe (religions), do (history, ethics) or interpret (creative arts). In short, the humanities seek to enlighten our understanding of the human condition, in all its variations, as they relate to those priceless experiences: nature, beauty and culture.

Individuals lie at the very heart of the humanities. It is what people say, think, believe, do or interpret that occupies so much of the discipline. This is different from the social sciences, with their emphasis upon society, business upon transactions, the natural sciences upon naturally occurring phenomena, and engineering with its focus on, well, things. People do matter. It is important that we study these peoplecentric subjects for their own sake, on their own terms, in their own, ever-changing but also timeless ways.

Study of the humanities bestows many benefits:

• cultural literacy, competency or excellence – supporting the creative within ourselves and helping us reach out to others;
• interpreting the lessons of the past, so that we create a more responsible future;
• providing cognitive (and sometimes affective) challenge, through dealing with slippery topics which require subtlety of thought, leading to wisdom rather than crisp solutions;
• learning how to tackle the really big issues (global warming, economic redefinition, racial intolerance and religious fundamentalism) from the viewpoint of the individual human beings who ultimately need to overcome them, rather than through the technological or economic ways and means of addressing them;
• underlying these fundamental contributions of the humanities, then, lies the realm of human values: the things that really matter to each one of us.

The humanities are, to considerable measure, about identifying, analysing, critiquing and interpreting values. Through their dispassionate commentary and through great, passionate works of literature and the arts, the humanities present models and anti-models of behaviour. From the wailing of the chorus in ancient Greek tragedy to the deconstruction of the lyrics of Kylie Minogue’s latest song, they challenge us about where we stand: on issues of the value of human life, the appropriateness of particular behaviours, the appreciation of beauty, the value of money, or the latest manifestation of human affection. From the viewpoint of responsible citizenship, they pose the challenge not just of knowing your rights but of doing what is right – a particularly important behaviour in an age when doing what is right and doing what is technically lawful may be entirely different matters. We might conclude, then, that the humanities are about the diagnosis of our human condition and consequential pathways of enlightenment, hopefully for the betterment of that condition. More technically, we could see the humanities as the operating system that drives the long-term distribution of moral goods.

I started to pursue this track of thinking about what the humanities offer through probing MasterCard’s line about ‘things money can’t buy’, and how the humanities are so rich in things that money cannot buy. But let us just remember that what MasterCard was offering was ‘the spending power to follow your passions’. If you have a MasterCard, you will know that as you pursue your passion for those ‘things money can’t buy’ – above all, happiness and the good life – you can rack up quite a monthly bill! The priceless can indeed be costly.

This brings me to one of the thornier questions about the humanities: how much needs to be ‘priced’ as we pursue the ‘priceless’? As I looked up my Horace translation online, it seemed to come ‘free’, which was, of course, not true. A ‘priced’ commercial track lay behind these ‘free’ words, not to mention the commercial lure of a seven-day holiday in Bermuda as I searched for the translation, or even the access fee to an Elsevier journal article about those ‘priceless’ lines.

There is ‘priced value’ in all sorts of things that such fields of scholarship might produce: skilled graduates who secure particular starting salaries (they do have a price on their heads), not to mention the IP value of research findings or course materials, earnings from media appearances and consultancy fees.

While the humanities might concentrate more upon moral goods, while they may help us to contemplate the divine or to experience priceless poetic moments, they only survive because enough passionate humanists take care of the balance sheets of ‘price’. As well as through philanthropy and lobbying for government support, this means realising commercial value: making sure that consumers pay producers, that ‘priceless’ does not mean ‘unpaid’ and that, ultimately, a standard of living is sustained by our humanists, young and old.

Put another way, the intrinsic value of the humanities is only best sustained when its extrinsic value is also recognised and sustained. Here I applaud Senator Kim Carr, the Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, who, in a Press Club address in Canberra on 3 September 2008 (www.minister.innovation.gov.au/Carr), had these enlightening words to say:

Whatever they may be worth in the marketplace, it is [the] intrinsic value [of the humanities, arts and social sciences] we should treasure them for. We should support these disciplines because they give us pleasure, knowledge, meaning, and inspiration.

Now, I am sure I could hear the cheers of many erstwhile colleagues all the way from London. Here was a statement from a federal minister, after many years of depressingly instrumental assessments of disciplinary value, saying that the humanities are intrinsically important: worth studying for their own sake and in their own way, not simply as a means to something else. Senator Carr had led up to this statement by referring to a novel he had just read and a play he had recently attended. He commented on how the novel had caused him to look at his own world ‘with fresh eyes’, while the play made him more aware of ‘the continuity between past and present’.

I was reminded of Italo Calvino’s wonderful Why Read the Classics? (trans. Martin McLaughlin). ‘A classic is a book,’ wrote Calvino, ‘which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading. A classic is a book which even when we read it for the first time gives the sense of rereading something we have read before ... A classic is a book which has never exhausted all it has to say to its readers.’ Finally, ‘A classic is a work which relegates the noise of the present to a background hum ... [that is] a classic is a work which persists as background noise even when a present that is totally incompatible with it holds sway’.

However, I was disappointed with the sentences that encircled Senator Carr’s strong statement about intrinsic value. He said: ‘I believe the creative arts – and the humanities and the social sciences – make a terrible mistake when they claim support on the basis of their commercial value ... No other pay-off [other than the intrinsic value] is required.’ I do not believe that the humanities can take refuge in the intrinsic value alone, however supportive Senator Carr may be. Ministers and governments can change; government funding just occasionally does not equal government rhetoric; and intrinsic value itself has its changing high and low tides of public recognition. More importantly: is it good for the humanities to deny or shun commercial value? Is it indeed good for the humanities if no other pay-off is required? I think not.

The humanities (even more so than the arts and the social sciences) need as many friends and links as possible. They need to intrude into as many debates and as many economies as they can. In short, the humanities matter because individual people matter. All those individual people, in their different ways, need to contribute to the successful propagation of the humanities and humanistic values. The greatest danger for the humanities lies in becoming an ornament of society – a government-funded (normally, as time goes by, a poorly government-funded) ornament. Mixed public-private support, with multiple avenues, options and fall-back positions should be the name of the game in times good and times bad.

Senator Carr’s paper was entitled ‘The Art of Innovation’. Earlier in it, he speaks of the central role of the humanities in developing ‘a culture that is smart, curious and unafraid of risk’. He identified ways in which the humanities are becoming more central to innovation: through identifying and interpreting user needs; through nurturing creative people; through an ever-greater role in collaborations and networks. I would add more examples: through becoming part of ‘industry’ – its products, transactions and culture – rather than just occasionally helping industry to find niftier ways of tackling its problems; and through creating valuable, highly priced content, and gaining the full reward for intellectual property that has, and should, generate the smart new directions of the knowledge economy and distinguish us from less receptive agricultural or manufacturing economies of former ages.

The humanities, at heart, may be more about ‘things that money can’t buy’ than most other disciplinary fields. Freedom, morality, justice, beauty, creativity and truth may be beyond price, but they do produce much that money can buy. They do have costs, as real as any other field, and their projects do still have their price, each and every one. I have never visited an arts faculty that did not know how to spend its budget at least twice over. So, let’s not get too purist or nostalgic here. I quote the Chief Executive of the British Library, Dame Lynne Brindley, who, in a paper entitled ‘Culture, Creativity and Research’, concluded:

New opportunities for creative interactions are enhanced by the tri-partite relationship between the subsidised culture, the commercial sphere, and the explosion in social networking and social production ... All sorts of hybrid activity and institutions are emerging in this fluid and dynamic space.

New Review of Academic Librarianship, vol. 14, nos 1–2, November 2008

Dame Lynne’s Library, the world’s second largest, also demonstrates that while libraries have huge intrinsic value – the collecting and reading of books is surely a good thing in itself – they also have extrinsic value, which Dame Lynne had the temerity, in the report ‘Increasing Our Value’ of 2005, to quantify at £4.40 for every £1 of public investment, leading to a total claim of £363 million for the Library’s annual value. The report went on to describe direct and indirect benefit from the Library’s activities, and its short chapters detailed eight areas where value to society and industry was increased through the Library’s work: creative industries, small and medium-size enterprises, research in science, technology and medicine, higher education, other education, public libraries, social inclusion and modernisation (www.bl.uk/aboutus/stratpolprog/increasingvalue/ index.html). Many of these are the same fields that Senator Carr hopes will drive Australian innovation.

You could go further and say that the commercial world is ultimately a reflection of the values of a culture. This is the line taken by John Armstrong, a philosopher-in-residence at the Melbourne Business School. In an article headed ‘Decline Reflects Poorly on the Arts’ (the Australian, 5 November 2008), Armstrong argues that the humanities have let us down. He sees that the humanities are about studying ‘what it is good to desire and what our real needs are’. But the humanities, in Armstrong’s analysis, are weak. They lack ‘missionary zeal’. And so business has not sensibly focused on these same questions, as it should have: ‘what is it good to desire?’; ‘what [are] our real needs?’. Armstrong concludes: ‘The idea of a civilised modern society should be one in which a strong commercial instinct serves a mature and widespread conception of the good life. When the humanities go into recession, the economy comes loose from its moorings.’ It almost sounds as if the global recession is really all the fault of the humanists and their failed mission.

Still, I think Armstrong is right that humanities values are not transmitting well, just at the time when they are needed more than ever. Traditional humanities values of defending freedom and cultivating dispassionate scholarship, for instance, have sometimes become excuses for noncommunication rather than what they should be: crucial strengths of a crucial disciplinary area. The intrinsic – the internal, the scholarly complex – have often won out; conversations have become comfortably collegial; and in so doing demonstrated, as Armstrong says, the ‘marginal place of the humanities’ in society today. We turn to business school and economic think-tank analysts for answers to current questions of global direction – rarely to the humanists who often have deeper answers to our increasingly distressed human condition. Economics rules over ethics; moral goods remain depreciated. While riots grow in the streets, little is done to address the needed change in the moral climate, especially with regard to the alignment between corporate senior management and shareholders which has been found to be fatally flawed: an alignment of greed.

Back to the question, then, of who has a stake in the humanities? Who pays for them? I have suggested that the humanities need to be deeply embedded in society, and that no sector should be let off the hook. Far from residing in ‘a place apart’, the humanities need hooks, including financial hooks, into all sectors: governments, business and industry, citizen groups, students, scholarly societies and philanthropists. Not only do these different stakeholders provide a check and balance upon each other; they provide multiple options for support when the going gets tough. Yes, values can be compromised, and tensions raised between different interest groups. Yes, weaker managers may stray too far from dispassionate scholarly roots in seeking to please sponsors, donors or governments. But a ‘full player’ role is undoubtedly preferable to the more comfortable role of the humanities as ‘ornament’, gathering dust on an upper shelf of society’s display cabinet.

Then I had moment to pause, because the world is in a very sorry state right now. For the last few months, as the hard times have become harder, a few words are upon many lips: ‘The state is back.’ The spectacular failures of capitalistic markets have led to the astoundingly rapid, indeed forced, resurgence of the state. Even Nicolas Sarkozy has been accused of being a ‘closet socialist’, largely because of France’s partial shielding from recession through its traditionally high level of public spending (‘Is Sarkozy a Closet Socialist?’, Economist, 13 November 2008).

For these last few months, the state has been welcomed back like a long-lost friend. In the United States, the solution to the current malaise can only lie with the state, with projections of budget deficits of trillions, now growing towards an astounding twelve per cent of GDP. Even in France, that deficit is now predicted to be 5.5 per cent of GDP this year (‘Back in the Driving Seat’, Economist, 12 March 2009). There is such a mountain of debt that in these recent days we are seeing something potentially very worrying: sluggishness even in buying the government bonds that fund these vast stimulus packages. The investors who traditionally snap up these ultra-secure government IOUs have, for once, been underwhelmed. The recent news that one British raising of under £2 billion worth of government bonds (gilts) was ten per cent undersubscribed might not be too worrying in itself. It is more worrying if we are looking at the raising of a further £150 billion to fund British government spending in 2009–10 alone (Robert Preston, ‘Gilts and Guilt’, 25 March 2009, www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/robertpeston/2009/03/gilts_and_guilt.html). This comes at a time when the Governor of the Bank of England has warned the prime minister, four weeks in advance of the annual budget, to stop spending (‘Mervyn King Warns Gordon Brown to Stop Spending’, The Times, 25 March 2009).

You do not need a degree in economics to know that governments have only three legitimate options for extra funds: they can raise taxes, they can borrow, or they can just print money. Britain is now doing all three. And other countries are following suit. Yes, the state is back, but in what a state – and with what dwindling options.

Australia, with a more secure banking system than most and with low levels of government debt, may be able to avoid some of these emerging northern-hemisphere debacles. But is the state really going to be the salvation of the humanities, along with everyone else, at this time? (I notice that in the allocation of new ‘research excellence’ money in Britain, it is the sciences, not the humanities, that have been ring-fenced.) And is today’s stimulus package merely tomorrow’s higher taxation, a dampener upon the enterprise of a coming generation?

It is at times like these that we especially need our philanthropists: people with passion, with charity, who want excellent return on their contribution, but in a form normally other than direct profit. They want to see their favourite art form preserved, needy students gaining scholarships, supporting new research, or putting money behind their faith in the judgement of experts. They want variously intrinsic and extrinsic returns on their investment. They bring these gifts because of their love of mankind and generosity of spirit. But they are also encouraged, or discouraged, in doing this by the levels of general taxation, rates for charitable deductions and the degree of control that they can exert over the way their gift is spent. They frequently want something priceless to result, but pay close attention to the price they need to pay along the way and how their money is being spent.

Donors, philanthropic foundations and other givers in society are increasingly being affected by the current collapse of financial markets. If we look at the United States, with total charitable giving at just over US$300 billion at its peak in 2007, we see four worrying factors:

• Super-wealth is down, as the latest Forbes listing of billionaires shows;
• Endowments are generally down, with Harvard University’s loss of around twenty per cent (around US$7 billion) leading the higher education sector down, and resulting already this year in a loss of one-third of the revenue fuelling Harvard’s operating budget;
• Individual philanthropic giving drops in relation to the decline in the stock market. Indiana University’s Centre on Philanthropy recently noted that ‘every time the stock market declines by 100 points, giving declines by $1.85 billion’ (‘Obama’s Tax Plan Could Cause Giving by the Wealthy to Drop by Several Billion Dollars Annually’, Chronicle of Philanthropy, 27 February 2009). Given that the New York stock market has fallen recently by about 6000 points, this means that – if this analysis is correct – we should expect a decline in giving of around $110 billion. That is, the loss of over one third of all American giving;
• An increase in top-bracket income tax, already announced in the United Kingdom, and projected at US federal level to grow from thirty-five per cent to 39.5 per cent might have been a boon for philanthropy, given the current ability to gain full taxation relief for charitable giving.

But the Obama plan is, as the Americans say, ‘a two-whammy proposal’, for in it the tax benefit for charitable deduction reduces from thirty-five per cent to twentyeight per cent, leaving an 11.5 per cent disincentive to charitable giving. Gregory V. Helvering, in American Thinker, had this to say earlier this month:

Audacious, no? If you are a taxpayer and think you can choose to support worthwhile charities instead of paying more money to the government, Obama is here to tell you: no, you can’t. If you are a charity and think that, as a private institution with private support, the government cannot affect the direction of your activities, Obama also has a response: yes, we can.

Helvering, ‘The Obama Double Tax Whammy’, American Thinker, 6 March 2009

Coupled with increased taxation for hard-pressed American states and city governments, you see here a linked series of disincentives to charitable giving, a direct consequence of the rapid, forced growth of public expenditure. As Helvering concludes, ‘Obama plans to take money people otherwise would have given to the charities of their choice and give it to the charities of his choice’.

It is still too early to estimate what the total hit on American giving levels might be, and how differentiated the response of philanthropists will be. However, some out-of-date figures from January suggest that it will be a differentiated response (Maria Di Mento and Caroline Preston, ‘A Year of Big Bequests’, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, 29 January 2009). Some of the biggest recipients – educational institutions, museums and libraries, for instance – seem to be accorded a stronger position, perhaps because of longer-term giving plans but also because of their fundamental importance to American concepts of societal advancement. So, in an overall scenario of decline, causes associated with the humanities may do relatively well. Performing arts and sports, however, perhaps with more short-term support and considered more as non-essential, ephemeral entertainment, may be hardest hit. Environmental causes, so rapidly growing in recent years, may suffer also, but for a different reason: they are just too long-term to grab attention at a time of acute concern about maintaining wealth or even just surviving. It is fine to save the planet, but most people will opt first to save their house, their company or to preserve their lifestyle.

Recent studies by Givewell and Philanthropy Australia report similarly that giving in Australia is down. In particular, I noticed a comment by the University of Western Australia’s Centre for Health and Ageing about growing philanthropic caution. ‘Unfortunately,’ wrote Osvaldo Almeida of the Centre, ‘when that happens it is the arts and science that tend to suffer most’ (Almeida, quoted in Amanda O’Brien, ‘Charities Hit Hard as Crisis Bites’, the Australian, 27 March 2009).

There is another factor of huge significance to the recipient of the gift. What can you – the recipient – do with it? Many charities face that dilemma right now because of donor provisions that require the principal sum to be preserved. In an age of microscopic interest rates – in the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan and, still coming down here in Australia – what is left to distribute? Even if donors do honour their pledges, what is there to spend?

But this may all be too gloomy. It is not certain that the Obama plan will win the day. A recent Bank of America poll of the wealthy found that over half said they would not change their philanthropic donations, even if there were no tax write-offs (‘Giving and Taxes’, editorial, The New York Times, 20 March 2009). How dark, then, will our dark times really be?

It is clear, however, that America leads the way in creating a new, tougher global climate for philanthropy, with prospects of less wealth to give away in coming years, higher taxation levels, more pressure to rein in deductions of all kinds, disappearing interest rates, and more differentiated approaches to causes than hitherto. As well, you can be sure that the pressure for accountability and the requirements of effective targeting of giving will only increase, imposing further burdens upon both givers and their recipients (see Katherine Fulton and Andrew Blau, Looking Back from 2025: An Orientation for Twenty-first Century Philanthropists, 2005). MasterCard’s priceless.com campaign also has a line for this world of accountability and targeted effectiveness: ‘Knowing you earned every second. Priceless.’

Our challenge as humanists, then, is to demonstrate our worth and trumpet our disciplinary, educational and research achievements; to know ourselves, but also to know others; to show the intrinsic and the extrinsic value of what we do; to recognise our importance as part of the public sector, but also of the private sector; to spread our risk across our many supporters, who support us in different ways and for different reasons; and to celebrate all that plurality – in short, to advocate the priceless and the priced, while always providing the best value for money.

Horace’s poetry did grow in the esteem of succeeding generations, as did another text of the following century, Longinus’s On the Sublime. Longinus reminds us that it is one thing to understand the human condition, but that we can also transcend the limits of the human condition through a sense of the sublime and through going beyond the technical issues to discover the soul. This is done primarily through metaphor and illusion. In an ultra-positivistic world of accountabilities and effectiveness indicators, it is imperative that the humanities – and, in another way, the visual and performing arts – keep the world of soul alive: to remind us that there is more, much more, to human life than the everyday and the mundane. We can all soar on the wings of poesy, to appreciate, however dimly, some aspect of the sublime: not just to know ourselves and others, but to go beyond ourselves and celebrate the highest manifestations of our humanity. ‘It is that whose presence reduces all else to nothingness’ (Janice Patten, ‘Longinus, “On the Sublime’’’, www.sjsu.edu/faculty/patten/sublime.html).

As MasterCard might well have said: ‘Transcending your human condition. Truly priceless.’

This is an edited version of a keynote address at the Second Symposium on Philanthropy and the Humanities, held at the University of Melbourne, 29–30 March 2009.