The list of people with more dignity than Donald Trump grows by the day. This week we can add football fans. On Sunday, supporters of Genoa spent the first 43 minutes of their team’s match against Empoli in almost unbroken silence, to remember the 43 people who died when a bridge collapsed in the city. The next day, the White House churlishly raised the stars and stripes which had been standing at half-mast for senator John McCain, when the convention is for it to remain lowered until the funeral.

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Trump soon bowed to criticism and quietly lowered the flag once more. Both this reversal and his initial refusal to grant his dead adversary a customary honour are tacit acknowledgments that such rituals matter. Communal commemorations may take arbitrary or even baffling forms, but they have an important role to play in civic life.

Take, for instance, the way in which politicians pay sombre tribute to the very people they were savaging when alive. This is often derided as hypocrisy, but it is right and fitting that when the reaper calls, we call truces. Life is full of conflict and struggles, all of which expire when we do. By suspending our hostilities when opponents die we give ourselves a chance to stop, think and make sure that we are not bringing more animosity to our dealings with others than we must. Tributes to our adversaries are at their best sincere acknowledgments that however divided we are, we are united in the frailty of the human condition.

This is another thing better understood in football stadiums than in the Oval Office. Like most football fans, supporters of Bristol City do not typically express loving kindness towards their local rivals. But still, when nine-year-old Bristol Rovers supporter Bailey Cooper died of non-Hodgkin lymphoma last Christmas Eve, City fans applauded him for a full minute as his picture was put on the display boards at their next home game.

The way we temporarily unite in death is also striking evidence that we do not live in as much of an atomised, individualistic society as it sometimes seems. When the Notting Hill Carnival fell silent for 72 seconds on Monday to remember the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire, the crowds were acknowledging that the tragedy was a collective loss. Society is a network of individuals and when you rip out a part of it, the hole in the whole is palpable.

It’s not that we all feel each other’s pain deeply. Intense grief is for people we know and love. Communal grief is something different: a brief, solemn pause to remind us of our shared mortality and the preciousness of life. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that many rituals around this involve a cessation of ordinary life – a silence, a lowering of the flag – and then, just as importantly, a marked return to normality. The flag goes back up, the crowd roars, the show goes on. Far from exaggerating our depth of feeling for others, the modesty and simplicity of such ceremonies has an unsentimental honesty.

Play Video 0:37 Genoa fans hold minute's silence before first match since bridge collapse - video

Compare this with the post-Diana trend for people to go on a pilgrimage to a death scene and leave something behind like a flower, a hand-written message or a teddy bear. Here there is a mismatch between the ostentatious display of grief and the lack of personal relationship with the deceased, as though the mourner’s life has really been changed by the passing of a stranger. In place of an understated, genuinely shared memorial the focus, is on each individual, one by one, taking turns to have their own moment with the dead. In more traditional forms of remembrance, it’s not about what you do. We’re all the same, standing silent together. That’s why it’s good that we don’t choose our own way to remember but do whatever is done, however, arbitrary, being it lower a flag or observe a silence.

One way in which public commemorations have evolved positively is that they are performed as much, if not more, for ordinary people as for the great and the good. It is right and proper that those who made extraordinary contributions to society receive special treatment, but as Warwick says in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, “Why, what is pomp, rule, reign, but earth and dust? / And, live we how we can, yet die we must.”

The democratisation of public remembrance in which citizens and senators alike are mourned is in keeping with the reality of death as the great leveller. A flourishing society depends on the contributions of both the democratic many and the exceptional few. The passing of both merits the pausing of civic life for sober, quiet, shared reflection.

• Julian Baggini is a philosopher and the author of A Short History of Truth