Monte Rio’s Renaissance man

Of all the places in the world Douglass Carmichael has visited, and of all the cultures, climates and billions of humans he could live among, the internationally known economic advisor and deep thinker has chosen Monte Rio for his home. Residents of that town and others along the Russian River consider it comforting that the 77-year-old Renaissance man and his wife, Penny Knapp, a psychiatrist and artist, live among them in a riverside cottage 10 minutes’ drive from the River’s mouth.

When Carmichael isn’t in New York City at philanthropist George Soros’ think tank, working with Al Gore’s global warming efforts or at Stanford, lecturing about new societal paradigms for a sustainable future, he writes and paints, showing his work at Guerneville’s monthly Art Walks and in the 100-year-old Northern Pacific Railroad car that doubles as his library.

Quoting Confucius, he said, “I listen carefully, try to be of use and take my recreation in the arts.”

Carmichael refers to himself as a consultant and a clinician, but because he has an insatiable thirst for information about how things work, and perhaps how to fix them, he has spent much of his life learning seemingly unrelated disciplines and combining them to understand the world’s most pressing problems.

During a long, distinguished life, he has gone from physicist to psychoanalyst, professor, corporate president and consultant to entities that include Bell Labs, Volvo, Hewlett-Packard, FEMA, the U.S. State Department, the White House and the World Bank.

“Once you’re in, you’re in,” Carmichael said simply, explaining the progression from commerce to international policy.

And if that’s not enough, he also plays Spanish guitar, is an excellent cook, can read Chinese and recently traveled with his wife to France to study landscape painting.

Says Carmichael, “My path has gone through but not abandoning physics to psychoanalysis to consulting to political and economic perspectives and strategy. The driving issue is: how to have a better life, how to have a better life for all, how cultures change, because if ours doesn’t, we are in trouble.”

He now serves as a strategy consultant for the Institute for New Economic Thinking, an organization conceived by Hungarian-born George Soros, the world’s sixth richest man and an internationally known supporter of “progressive-liberal” political causes.

And when at home in Monte Rio, he is at work on a book called “GardenWorld,” the vision of a better world that is possible to those who are willing to disengage themselves from the “bottleneck of interlocked issues: population, inequality, robotization, climate, war, weak and corrupt governance and poor quality of life, all issues of human making on the planet, that keep us from getting to the future.”

Carmichael’s nature began to show itself when he was a young boy growing up in New York City. He was drawn to Central Park and the outdoors and, oozing with self confidence and desire at age 15, he set out on the road. He finished high school in Southern California, he said, “because I wanted to go to Caltech and study physics, which I did.”

Among his college colleagues was Richard Feynman, who parlayed a knowledge of quantum electrodynamics and particle physics into a Nobel Price for Physics in 1965, sharing it with two other physicists. During his tenure at California Institute of Technology in Pasadena between 1955 and 1959, “I worked in the low temperature nuclear physics lab for three years, best part of my education there,” Carmichael said. “The lab won the Nobel for the Mossbauer effect in about 1958.”

He also found that reading Yeats, Elliot, Mann and Joyce was “a great antidote to physics.”

With the sciences under his belt, he grew more interested in people and went to UC Berkeley to pursue a doctorate In developmental psychology. His dissertation concerned “looking at rhetoric,” he said, or the study of compelling speech.

“It was the time of the cognitive revolution,” he said, “and I sensed that mechanization was creeping into models. I saw Piaget had done logic and math, Chomsky had done grammar, so I thought of rhetoric, the third in the trivium.”

Carmichael followed that with post-doctoral work at Harvard and a trip to Mexico to study psychoanalysis with Eric Fromm, author of “The Art of Loving” and one of the world’s greatest psychoanalysts.

After returning to the U.S., Carmichael taught at UC Santa Cruz “in it’s earliest days,” then joined the faculties at Catholic University of the Americas and the Washington School of Psychiatry.

He eventually tired of that and became motivated by the desire “to understand and sort out my thinking concerning politics and to build a private practice and consulting organizational strategy,” he said. To accomplish the latter, he moved to Washington D.C.

As an economic advisor, Carmichael served as president of Metasystems Design Group and BigMind Media, which led to his high-profile clients.

In recent years he has focused on philanthropy and community development, using the humanities to enhance societal policy making. As a visiting scholar at Stanford University, he helped develop the Stanford Strategy Studio, where he worked on issues related to climate change and social thought.

Sharing his passions can be difficult for someone as well read and well traveled as Carmichael. When asked about his chief interests, for example, he said they lie “in technology and society as a symptom of deeper fissures in the human, technology symbiosis,” and in finding ways to repair what’s irreparably damaged.

Throughout his life he has found equals. When asked which of his unique friends he would most like to have over for dinner, Carmichael chose the Viennese-born philosopher Paul Karl Feyerabend, whose major works include “Against Method” and “Science in a Free Society.” They were colleagues at UC Berkeley.

“(I have had) lots of friends, several relationships, three wonderful children, four grandchildren, and I like the arts,” he went on to say. “I paint, play a little Bach on the guitar, read a lot of literature and history, think about poetry and love architecture.”

Contact River Towns Correspondent Stephen D. Gross at sdgross@sonic.net.

Editor’s Note: This story was updated 1/12/15 to correct the name of physicist Richard Feynman.