In Psalm 8, when the question is asked about man it says that God inspires praise from the mouths of babes and sucklings, to silence the arrogance of the wise. Thomas Aquinas, one of the wise men who considered himself the least among the learned, gives us an explanation of this fact. By their nature, all men are endowed with a certain upright and sure instinct that directs them to the good and the true, to God. The simple keep this instinct all their life. Just as it happens in an accident when one of the senses is lost, i.e., sight or hearing, in cultural accidents it happens that the sense of man or of God is lost.
Axiology speaks of the deafness and blindness of some to certain values.
Modern culture has produced the eclipse and the blurring of the truths about freedom and man. Man knows many things, more than before, but he cannot respond about what is essential to his being as man. He has become ignorant of the essential, blind to the great questions of origin, essence and destiny. The steps along the way of modern and postmodern man and the places where he has been blind and deaf to ethical values can be outlined today. In fact, the modern age has abandoned the role of ethical formation and the paideia of freedom, so important in man's formation.