It will be something as quiet as a change of mind, a change of mind that is bubbling up out of the unconscious depths, spreading around the world, changing everything. It is much easier, of course, to answer that question about the seventeenth century. In retrospect, we can easily see that the most important development for the world was not the Thirty Years' War and the Peace of Westphalia, nor the ending of the Ming dynasty in China, nor even the establishment of colonies along the Atlantic seaboard of North America. Most people would probably agree, after some thought, that the winner is that total change of view which we call the scientific revolution. The scientific revolution started in Western Europe and ultimately affected the lives of people all over the Earth, in ways so fundamental it is hard to find a comparable transformation anywhere in history.
Few today doubt that the world is going through some sort of structural transition.
The evidence suggesting this is omnipresent. How major the structural change will be is more disputable. In sharp contrast to the hundreds of segments we have all seen of Palestinian teenagers throwing rocks at Israeli soldiers who are not much more than teenagers themselves, and of Israeli soldiers firing at Palestinians, this segment profiles an Israeli and a Palestinian. One has lost his eldest son who was his best friend. The other has lost his brother, who died while he was looking at him.