For at least the second time this year, Marco Rubio delivered a stirring speech championing the virtues of Western civilization — “a civilization,” he said Wednesday from the Acropolis in Athens, Greece, “that we must fight to defend today with the same passion as our forefathers did.”

The same week, Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, announced that the Pentagon would livestream the execution of the Fort Hood killer. President Donald Trump decided to buy diesel fuel directly from Russia, potentially amounting to billions in funding for Vladimir Putin’s war machine. And The Wall Street Journal reported that Kimberly Guilfoyle, the U.S. ambassador to Greece, is under investigation by the State Department’s inspector general for receiving improper gifts in exchange for political and business favors.

Is this what the secretary of state meant by Western civilization?

In fact, all people, including non-Westerners who aren’t yet its beneficiaries, should want to celebrate, defend and perpetuate Western civilization. But that requires a basic understanding of what Western civilization is. The Trump administration, above all, could use a primer.

At its base, it’s a civilization that rests on three pillars.

The first is the quest for truth. “Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts,” the Psalms say, “and in the hidden part thou shalt make me to know wisdom.” Socrates says much the same thing when he tells the Athenian jurors who will condemn him to death that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” This truth-seeking enterprise requires a combination of scrupulous honesty and self-scrutiny, as well as courageous skepticism of all prevailing beliefs, including religious and ideological ones.

In this sense, the Western tradition is an inherently revolutionary one in that it is constantly questioning and sometimes overthrowing the conventions and convictions that uphold every society. But it’s also an inherently humble one, because the quest for truth is always premised on the understanding that one never fully possesses the truth itself. That paradoxical demand for both epistemic humility and boldness is resolved only through a method that asks us to subject every idea, above all our own, to close examination and unsparing criticism; a method, in turn, that requires freedom of conscience, inquiry and speech.

The second is the worth and dignity of every human being, created by God “in our image, after our likeness.” It’s an immense idea. It sacralizes human life. It enjoins us not to sacrifice children, or murder brothers or strangers, or kill except for self-defense. It establishes a basis of equality between rich and poor, clever and dumb, strong and weak. It is the basis of the Declaration of Independence and the Declaration of the Rights of Man; of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution; of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

Not every civilization honors this idea, including, throughout much of its own history, the West itself. But today it marks a dividing line between the West and the rest, regardless of whether we stop to notice.

Right-wingers who see Putin as a bulwark of traditional European values should think hard about the military tactics of a regime that lets 1,000 of its soldiers get killed every day for the sake of a few additional yards of Ukrainian soil. Left-wingers who sympathize with Palestinian militancy should notice that Hamas deliberately hides behind, between and beneath its own civilians as a tactic of defense and propaganda. Technocratic types who envy Chinese growth figures (however doubtful their accuracy) should observe the immense human cost by which much of that growth has been achieved.

The final pillar is the rule of law: law that stands above the convenience of the privileged and the caprice of the powerful. Aristotle famously said that law “is reason unaffected by desire.” It is also justice unaffected by fear, fairness unaffected by favor, process unaffected by influence, precedent unaffected by fashion and order unaffected by circumstance.

When I was growing up in Mexico City in the 1970s and ’80s, it was obvious to most everyone that the rule of law was a sham: that laws and regulations existed to be bent or broken with bribes, that politics was a mechanism for exorbitant self-enrichment and that the government maintained its power through a combination of fear, malign neglect and public cynicism. More and more, the United States under this current administration reminds me of the Mexico of my youth.

Whatever else that was, and is, it does not meet the basic tests of Western civilization. Nor do cage matches on the White House lawn; big cans of whoop-ass unloaded on long-standing allies; tornadoes of mendacity from the president’s mouth; political purges among uniformed military officers; casual conspiracy theories from the vice president about Jews, municipal elections and space aliens; assaults on elementary science from the head of the public health bureaucracy; performative toadyism by nearly every appointed or elected Republican official; unceasing efforts to cast doubt on the integrity of past elections and corrupt future ones; the Trump family’s contempt for public ethics; the indecent and inhuman tactics of Immigration and Customs Enforcement; and the dizzying kaleidoscope of incompetence, inattention, bullying and sheer weirdness that typifies nearly every waking moment in this presidency.

Asked what he thought of Western civilization, Mahatma Gandhi is said to have quipped, “I think it would be a good idea.” It would be a good idea, too, if the Trump administration knew what it was talking about when it talked about that same civilization.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.