It’s easy to understand the grief that the French people are feeling in the wake of the devastation of Notre Dame. More puzzling is the sense of shame that the Guardian’s Paris correspondent Angelique Chrisafis highlighted in her report. “On our watch we let it burn,” she quotes an older woman in tears saying.

This sentiment was echoed in Jonathan Miller’s Spectator blog in which he wrote, “There is also a shame to this. How could this have happened? Isn’t France better than this?” Both Chrisafis and Miller have lived in France for years and are reporting from the ground. The shame they have identified seems real.

There are many who instinctively understand when any society goes wrong its members have to share the responsibility

At first sight, this seems very odd. Why would anyone feel shame over an accident? To understand this, think back to reactions in South Korea to the sinking of the ferry MV Sewol in 2014: 304 passengers and crew members died, mostly students. As one newspaper commentator put it, “Our nation has run headlong toward the goal of becoming wealthy for half a century, but we turned a blind eye to the goal of being a civilised and safe society.” The Korean people viewed the tragedy as a failing of society as a whole, not any particular individual or ferry company.

This also explains the shame of the Korean community in the US after the shootings by Seung-Hui Cho at Virginia Tech in April 2007. Seung-Hui killed 32 people and injured 17 others before committing suicide, in the worst school massacre in US history. As the philosopher Tamler Sommers put it, “Koreans did not merely feel shame for the act of the Virginia Tech killer, they felt responsible.”

It’s not a mere coincidence that both these examples involve Koreans. Collective shame is something we associate more with non-western cultures, especially east Asian ones. Anthropologists distinguish between guilt and shame cultures. Western nations are typically guilt cultures where the focus is on individual culpability and private conscience. With this focus on the individual, in order for anyone to be held responsible they have to have a direct role in the wrongdoing.

Eastern societies are more often shame cultures, where people share a sense of responsibility, and guilt is expressed publicly through mechanisms such as ostracisation. With the emphasis on the social group, people are often proud or ashamed of what members of their community do, whether they bear any direct responsibility or not.

Play Video 1:11 Notre Dame Cathedral: before and after the devastating fire – video

The fact that many French people instinctively feel shame at the destruction of Notre Dame is evidence that the cult of individualism has not yet completely triumphed in the west. There are many who still instinctively understand when any society goes wrong its members have to share the responsibility. As even the anthropologists who use the shame/guilt distinction know, the idea that the west is individualistic, the east collectivist is far too simplistic. The difference is a matter of emphasis, not kind.

The shame of Notre Dame shows that even in the individualism-dominated west we retain a strong implicit awareness that everyone is a product of their society. You cannot separate who you are from the culture in which you developed. Society is not a mere collection of atomised individuals. We are more than simply all cut from the same cultural cloth – we’re all part of the same fabric.

The ideology of individualism struggles to accept this fully. When Margaret Thatcher famously said, “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families”, she was doing little more than repeating individualistic common sense. Even at the time, however, many intuitively knew she was wrong.

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Accepting the legitimacy of collective guilt does not of course mean that the French really ought to be ashamed for neglecting their heritage. The Notre Dame fire might turn out to have been simply an unfortunate accident. It could be like when a parent feels guilt when something happens to their child which they later realise is misplaced. It is nonetheless the right instinct to question whether you have fulfilled your duty of care. The impulse to look to yourself and your society rather than to point the finger at culpable individuals is a noble one, even if ultimately the French judge themselves to be blameless.

Many of those who resist the idea that collective shame or guilt is ever appropriate display a curious double standard in that they are more than happy to share in collective pride. Few think it strange to feel the heart swell at the sight of British athletes winning Olympic gold medals or to delight in the excellence of British art and culture.

It seems our willingness see ourselves as bound up with wider society depends not on any consistent attitude towards what makes us individuals but simply whether the result of that identification reflects well or badly on us. We should be more honest. We are not as independent and autonomous as we like to think. When we insist that the failings of our society have nothing to do with us, we deny who we really are.

• Julian Baggini is a writer and philosopher