This simply baffles me. All I can do is give a series of anecdotes, fictional and actual.
The nice thing about problems/questions in many math texts is that you find the answer in the back of the book. The condition for that is the premise that all the problems _have_ answers. This is coddling the children. The book should have a problem like, "If 5+3 = 7, what is the average number of cows per infant in Figi?" After all, everyone knows that if a question can be asked, there must be a good answer.
Back in 1966 or 1967, when I was not a marxist but was beginning to be dissatisfied with such politics as I professed, in an argument with a friend in the department I was driven, finally, to say, "Bob, first you have to admit that nothing, nothing at all, can be done. Then maybe we can start talking about what can be done." Perhaps the core of avoidance politics is this insistence that there is _always_ "something to be done," that there is no problem, no agony, that can't be relieved. (This friend later published a paper, "Letting Students Be," in College English. Trying to follow the teaching techniques recommended there, he was eventually embittered because letting students grade themselves didn't result in the grades he would have given, and he retired early to write a novel or something. (At an NUC conference I mentioned to Richard Ohlman that I was the one who had radicalized the author of that piece. Ohlman was editor of CE at the time. Richard commented that I had done a damn poor job of it!) I think this insistence that there must be an answer to everything is related to what Kenneth Burke referred to as the liberal technique of referring it to committee.
At the University of Michigan Ph.D. candidates in English take a course entitled "Bibliography and Research Methods." One of the assignments in the course is to take a U.of M. dissertation from the files, describe the problem it sets out to solve, describe the method used, and determine whether the method was appropriate or not. If the writer had failed to establish his/her thesis, the critic was to describe the method that _would_ have worked. A friend of mine picked a dissertation on _Return of the Native_. It seems that this work (as I vaguely remember it) exists in two versions, a manuscript version and the published version, which differ in some way I don't remember. The dissertation argued that there must have existed a _third_ version, the Ur-version as it were, differing from both of the extant versions, which were derived from it. My friend argued in his paper that the thesis was not proved and that no method (short of appealing to a medium to channel Hardy) existed by which it could be established. The professor gave him a low grade on the basis that if the thesis topic had been approved by the departmental graduate committee there must exist a method that would work.
My own early education as a marxist was greatly helped by my younger daughter's insistence that I tell her whether I would have voted for Lincoln had I been alive in 1860. (She brought this memory up during her visit here a week ago.) I told her that had I been alive in 1860 I would not have been me so the question had no answer. My non-answer utterly failed to persuade her at the time, though she later came to see my point.
There really are questions that have no answer. It is fatuous to go on insisting that every question has an answer and that there is something wrong with those who can't or won't answer such questions.
Suppose the president issued a proclamation to the effect that death from polycystic kidneys must stop and that he was beginning to bomb all medical schools until they discovered a remedy. Then if someone condemned the bombing, she could be told, "You're just a crazy revolutionary defeatists. What are you going to say to the families of those who are dying from polycystic kidneys? You just have no feeling for their misery."
Carrol