In Zen Buddhism, there are two related terms for awakening: kensho and satori. Kensho is a glimpse — a sudden flash of insight where the nature of reality becomes momentarily clear. Satori is deeper and more lasting. It's not just seeing the truth for a moment; it's a fundamental shift in how you exist.
Applied to history
World War One was a kensho-event for the industrialised world. The flash of horror: technology and nationalism together could produce mechanised slaughter on an almost incomprehensible scale. But a kensho doesn't automatically produce transformation. The interwar period shows all the signs of an entity that has had a glimpse but hasn't integrated it — scrambling to return to something like the old order, while the same forces gathered again.
World War Two was something different. Not a glimpse but a full confrontation, impossible to look away from. The post-war architecture of international institutions, human rights law, the welfare state, decolonisation — these look like a civilisation that has, however imperfectly, begun to integrate what it learned.
The personal parallel
This maps onto how psychological growth often works for individuals too. A difficult experience gives you a glimpse of something you'd been avoiding. But unless you do the slower, less dramatic work of actually integrating it, you'll cycle back to similar situations looking for what you haven't yet absorbed.
Awakening isn't the dramatic moment of seeing. It's what you do after.