“The goal of my entire career as an historian was to ensure that citizens learned the lessons of history—including the vital lesson that antisemitic rhetoric can be translated into genocidal reality if it is adopted by a modern state. Yet today, as AI permeates social networks, anti-history is spreading like a cancer.”
So wrote Free Press columnist Niall Ferguson after publishing, along with artificial intelligence researcher John-Clark Levin, a provocative essay titled “The Death of History.” In it, they argue that the institutions and methods that for decades have helped preserve historical truth are now being overwhelmed by AI and social media. Ferguson’s conclusion? “I have to admit: I have failed utterly.” It is an extraordinary admission from one of our nation’s leading historians, and one that has raised many questions in the days since: Have historians failed? Is truth itself losing its authority? Or is this just a new battlefield in an old fight?
To explore those questions, we turned to a group of leading historians, writers, and public intellectuals. Below, Victor Davis Hanson, Deborah Lipstadt, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Ben Shapiro, and others weigh in on whether we really are witnessing the death of history—and what, if anything, should come next. —The Editors
Victor Davis Hanson: Historians Must Rise Up
Niall Ferguson is, of course, correct that AI and social media supercharge sensationalized pseudo-history offered by the half-educated. He is also correct that the spread of pernicious lies allows a fake past to alter a real present.
But these dangers hardly suggest history is dead, and that historians are now defeated. The message of history is timeless, the medium of the new technologies transitory. Just because modern pumps deliver 3,000 gallons of water per minute versus 19th-century hand pumps that strained to produce three gallons does not mean the essence of water itself was changed by radically new delivery systems.
The nature of war remains understandable because human nature is constant—despite the bewildering new technologies of death that each generation conjures to supposedly “reinvent” war. In other words, figures such as Darryl Cooper, an online historian and Holocaust revisionist, have no monopoly on such methods of dissemination, some of which could equally be used to correct his nonsense—if there were a will to do so.
One reason why these electronic provocateurs succeed is the silence of historians. Too many are reluctant to wade into the online miasma and use their expertise for the public good. Academics as a species are not adverse to publicity—in fact, they yearn for public recognition—but rarely at the expense of crossing the internet mob. Daryl Coopers proliferate because the university turned history into melodrama and campus historians, too often, into nodding human bots.
“Too many are reluctant to wade into the online miasma and use their expertise for the public good.” —Victor Davis Hanson
Similarly, the farce that was The New York Times’ 1619 Project lived on far longer than it should have, since only a few American historians took the time and the heat to dismantle the faddishness and incoherence of its progenitor, Nikole Hannah-Jones.
But as the university continues to lose credibility with the public, and as renegade podcasts proliferate, historians must accelerate their own public outreach through online courses, intellectually honest historical podcasts, and, yes, new technologies that can crowd out the chaff of counterfeit history.
To suggest this is impossible is not just to surrender history to electrified ignorance, but to surrender learning itself.
Victor Davis Hanson is the author of hundreds of articles, book reviews, and newspaper editorials on Greek, agrarian, and military history. He has written or edited 24 books, including The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won.
