Seldom do I receive invites to sympathize with the truth.
'How' truths tend not to be very sympathetic things, though we can sometimes be grateful for them.
How can I fix my car? How does this disease progress? How can it be treated?' How will edcation help my child's future? How will age affect my mind and body?'
By contrast:
Why won't my car start? Why am I sick? Why should my child get go to college? Why do people get old?'
All are political questions -- they relate to the exercise of power, and how we feel when we can't exercise power, or when it's exercised on us. All invite us to throw our sympathy somewhere.
I have also found that how too easily becomes a logical excuse for the truth of why. A thing that I used to hate, but now realize to be a formality.
If 'why' questions have a definitive, truthful answer I don't think I've ever seen it. They have many answers, some supported by demonstrable 'hows' and some not. E.g.
My car won't start because I don't maintain it; because it's old; because it's cheap; because the guy who sold it to me was a shonk.
I'm sick because I'm always eating junk food; because I'm stressed; because the kids brought a bug home from school.
My child should go to college because he'll get a good job; because he'll be respected; because he has no clue what to do with his life.
People get old so they can move aside for the young; because otherwise the young would kill them; because life's a bitch and then you die.
The answers to why make great fiction; they can be very compelling. They're also a strange mixture of the provable (i.e. supported by a demonstrable how), the disprovable (a how will refute them), and the unprovable. They're also full of value-judgements, biases and assumptions. They're great at telling us who we are, but not great at telling us what's real and what's not.
I can agree that why is political and may be so by nature. How is not exempt from politics. Skills development is required to prevent the political utilization of how.
I think you're right -- in the sense that it's only if we have competent hows that we can stop the whys taking over.
Copernicus and Galileo both had a credible how (how it is that celestial bodies seem to move) that got smacked around by the whys of the time (why the earth isn't at the centre of the universe). In modern times, opinions about how man may be changing climate are being smacked around by why we should do anything about it.
The skills I refer to involve the ability to acknowledge why (regardless of any disdain or esteem attributed by self and/or others), and detach from it while also working with it. To disregard why for how sacrifices the soundness of judgment as does the disregard or political utilization of how for why.
I think you have a point here, Gehanna. Because why relates to our sense of who we are, it captures our moral, political and ethical sense. In that respect, how informs why, and why should guide how (or at least 'what'). But I still think we over-use why in physics, and under-use how in morality. But in fairness, perhaps we under-use why in logistics, and over-use how in technology too.