No, I think it is an awakening because they are accepting more kinds of variance in social behavior than ever before. To me, this is something that started with the industrial revolution in england when we began to move from agricultural sort of ways of living to being in cities in advanced economies. The surplus labor made us have to transfer value to new kinds of professions and technology made task completion based less on physical power and more neutral giving women more ability to compete in society. This has been a 300 year transformation whose effects are still being felt in the west and can be seen in rural resistance to the change in cultural norms in the metropolitan areas. The battlefront in the west now is in acceptance of lgbt people particularly transgender individuals, but 50 years ago it was based more on acceptance of women and racial minorities. So there seems to be a certain cultural progression that keeps occurring as time goes on. Culture dominated by masculinity/power ---> power shifts to intellectual power not physical power---> power becomes distributed more with access to greater economic freedom/education ---> power shifts to women as they become more educated and are allowed more sexual choice---> acceptance of other minorities in society. All cultures are now undergoing this perspective shift emotionally, but it will take generations to accept the change that is already in progress in the arab world where you are now seeing women with more ability to self-determine by being allowed to drive for example. This is in part taking place in the parts of the world whose economy is resource based for historical reasons more slowly because the power dynamic there has always been different as can be seen in this video:
The power dynamic is different because there has not been as much surplus, but now with capitalism making the entire world richer there is becoming more surplus so power is shifting from controlling scarce goods to education. To me, this is a sort of spiritual transformation that you see in the writings of Tielhard de Chardin and his focus on an ever expanding circle of christ-like love for all people. I view the spirit as the biochemical process that keeps us alive and that "spirit" is transforming to more and more acceptance of a different kind of reality from the one "we grew up in" as a species which was very harsh, cold, primal, and brutal in the trees when we would club one another to death. Now we are becoming transhuman and learning new ways of being that accept the greater statistical variance that comes with larger populations
It is only when a theory is a good explanation - hard to vary - that it even matters whether it is testable or not. Therefore, bad explanations are useless whether they are testable or not.