Thank you for such a good, succinct summary of that transformative event. It might seem like semantic quibbling to say it created our contemporary world, not the Modern world, but I do think that distinction is important. Modernity’s most salient characteristic before that event was confidence in rationality. World War I destroyed that confidence — even though it was the ideology of nationalism, not rationality, that precipitated and sustained that war. Even so, rationality has been in retreat ever since.